An Adaptability-Based Terrain Costmap for Heterogeneous Vehicle Swarm Path Planning

In this paper, an adaptability-based terrain costmap is proposed, aiming at planning paths for heterogeneous vehicles with different adaptability to terrains. In order to break through the restrictions from binary costmaps which only illustrate the free grids and obstacles, a terrain costmap is designed to provide terrain details over grids. For swarm path plannings, an adaptability matrix is established for representing the adaptability aspects of heterogeneous vehicles regarding to various terrains. The evaluation method for terrain cost is proposed by combining vehicle adaptability matrix and terrain costmap and its feasibility and effectiveness is validated by the simulated experiment, showing that more practically optimal paths can be obtained using the adaptability-based terrain costmap method, without additional expenses on costmap conversion and maintenance by heterogeneous vehicles.