# 2812 / An Interaction-Aware Two-Level Robotic Planning And Control System For Vegetation Override ## Authors Charles Noren, Burhanuddin Shirose, Bhaskar Vundurthy, Sebastian Scherer, and Matthew Travers {% hint style="info" %} Paper presented at ISTVS 2024 | 21st International and 12th Asia-Pacific Regional Conference of the ISTVS\ Keywords: Trajectory Optimization; Planning; Vegetation Override; Off-road Driving; Robotics\ {% endhint %} ## Abstract During off-road operations, mobile robotic platforms often encounter objects that influence the platform’s route. As determining the outcome of an interaction with an object (e.g., overriding) is difficult, many robotic planners are designed to avoid interactions with all environmental objects. Yet, this object-adverse planning behavior is not reflected in the actions of expert human operators, who may interact with objects in order to find a viable path towards their goal. This work intends to emulate that human operator intuition. Our objective is to improve the performance of robotic traversals in off-road terrains through the development of a planning paradigm that allows certain safe contact with environmental objects. Specifically, we design a two-level hierarchical planning and control system which couples a contact-informed regional motion planner with contact-constrained local nonlinear trajectory optimization techniques. The approach is demonstrated for classes of vegetative objects which are characterized by existing parameterized collision models from the terramechanics community. The top level of the hierarchy combines sampling-based planning techniques with a set of override (velocity) constraints derived from these collision models during the search for a minimum-time trajectory towards the platform’s goal. This minimum-time trajectory is then passed to the lower-level of the architecture, which utilizes direct collocation and model predictive control techniques to ensure that the velocity constraints are enforced during trajectory execution. The capabilities of the architecture are shown both in simulation and onboard a robotic platform, where vegetation is reasoned about and then overridden depending on the environment, platform, and object geometry. *** Full paper purchase: \ ISTVS members receive three complimentary papers per year: --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://2024.istvs.org/submissions/papers/2812.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.