Abstract
Driving energy consumption plays a major role in the navigation of
autonomous mobile robots in off-road scenarios. However, real-time
constraints often limit the accuracy of the energy estimations,
especially in scenarios where accurate wheel-terrain interactions are
complex to model. This paper reports on first results of an adaptive
deep meta-learning energy-aware path planner that can provide energy
estimates of a mobile robot traversing complex uneven terrains with
varying and unknown terrain properties. A novel feature of the method is
the integration into the meta-learning framework of a 1D convolutional
neural network to analyze the terrain sequentially, in the same temporal
order as it would be experienced by the robot when moving, and
efficiently adapt its energy estimates to the local terrain conditions
based on a small number of local measurements. The performance of the
method is assessed in a 3D-body dynamic simulator over several
typologies of deformable terrains and unstructured geometries. We
provide evidence of the benefit of the proposed approach to retain 83%
r2 score of the original simulator at 0.55% of the computing time.
Finally, we compare the method with alternative state-of-the-art deep
learning solutions. In this way, we show indications of its improved
robustness to provide more informed energy estimations and
energy-efficient paths when navigating over challenging uneven terrains.