Traversability-Aware Exploration for Mobile Robot Using 3D LiDAR

In real-world environments, wheel-based mobile robots often encounter non-traversable terrain, such as stairs or steep slopes, which can result in navigation failures or mechanical hazards. However, conventional exploration methods fail to evaluate terrain traversability, resulting in unsafe trajectories. To address these limitations, we propose a traversability-aware exploration framework that enhances safety by integrating terrain analysis into the path planning process. First, traversable regions are detected based on multiple terrain conditions, while accounting for hazardous areas such as stair edges that may be misclassified due to sensor blind spots. Second, traversability-aware path filtering is applied, where candidate paths are evaluated using Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based terrain features during A∗ search to exclude unsafe paths. An experiment is conducted in a simulation environment that includes a non-traversable area. As a result of the experiment, the proposed method achieves a higher success rate compared to the existing method.