Terrain perception for DEMO III

The Demo III program has as its primary focus the development of autonomous mobility for a small rugged cross country vehicle. Enabling vision based terrain perception technology for classification of scene geometry and material is currently under development at JPL. In this paper we report recent progress on both stereo-based obstacle detection and terrain cover color-based classification. Our experiments show that the integration of geometric description and terrain cover characterization may be the key to enabling successful autonomous navigation in cross-country vegetated terrain.