Efficient Autonomous Navigation of a Quadruped Robot in Underground Mines on Edge Hardware
Embodied navigation in underground mines faces significant challenges, including narrow passages, uneven terrain, near-total darkness, GPS-denied conditions, and limited communication infrastructure. While recent learning-based approaches rely on GPU-accelerated inference and extensive training data, we present a fully autonomous navigation stack for a Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped robot that runs entirely on a low-power Intel NUC edge computer with no GPU and no network connectivity requirements. The system integrates LiDAR-inertial odometry, scan-matching localization against a prior map, terrain segmentation, and visibility-graph global planning with a velocity-regulated local path follower, achieving real-time perception-to-action at consistent control rates. After a single mapping pass of the environment, the system handles arbitrary goal locations within the known map without any environment-specific training or learned components. We validate the system through repeated field trials using four target locations of varying traversal difficulty in an experimental underground mine, accumulating over 700 m of fully autonomous traverse with a 100% success rate across all 20 trials (5 repetitions x 4 targets) and an overall Success weighted by Path Length (SPL) of 0.73 \pm 0.09.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
MineXplore: An Open-Source Reinforcement Learning Exploration Benchmark for GNSS-Denied Underground Environment
Underground mines present extreme conditions for autonomous robot navigation: GPS is denied, lighting is degraded, and tunnel topology is loop-rich and non-convex. Simulation benchmarks grounded in real production-mine g…
Reinforcement LearningRobot NavigationAutonomous Grasping On Quadruped Robot With Task Level Interaction
Quadruped robots are increasingly used in various applications due to their high mobility and ability to operate in diverse terrains. However, most available quadruped robots are primarily focused on mobility without obj…
Object DetectionReactive Robot-Centric Safety for Autonomous Navigation in Constrained and Dynamic Environments
In this work, we address the problem of ensuring real-time safety in autonomous robot navigation, in spatially constrained dynamic environments, by utilizing only onboard sensors. We present a real-time control architect…
Collision AvoidanceRobot NavigationAutonomous Navigation for Quadrupedal Robots with Optimized Jumping through Constrained Obstacles
Quadrupeds are strong candidates for navigating challenging environments because of their agile and dynamic designs. This paper presents a methodology that extends the range of exploration for quadrupedal robots by creat…
Autonomous NavigationDecision MakingNavigateStinger Robot: A Self-Bracing Robotic Platform for Autonomous Drilling in Confined Underground Environments
The increasing demand for critical raw materials has revitalized interest in abandoned underground mines, which pose extreme challenges for conventional drilling machinery due to confined, unstructured, and infrastructur…