Most conventional wheeled robots can only move in flat environments and simply divide their planar workspaces into free spaces and obstacles. Deeming obstacles as non-traversable significantly limits wheeled robots' mobility in real-world, non-flat, off-road environments, where part of the terrain (e.g., steep slopes, rugged boulders) will be treated as non-traversable obstacles. To improve wheeled mobility in those non-flat environments with vertically challenging terrain, we present two wheeled platforms with little hardware modification compared to conventional wheeled robots; we collect datasets of our wheeled robots crawling over previously non-traversable, vertically challenging terrain to facilitate data-driven mobility; we also present algorithms and their experimental results to show that conventional wheeled robots have previously unrealized potential of moving through vertically challenging terrain. We make our platforms, datasets, and algorithms publicly available to facilitate future research on wheeled mobility.

翻译：大多数传统轮式机器人仅能在平坦环境中移动，并简单地将它们的二维工作空间划分为自由空间和障碍物。将障碍物视为不可穿越区域，极大地限制了轮式机器人在真实世界中非平坦、非铺装环境（例如陡峭斜坡、崎岖巨砾）中的移动能力，因为此类地形中的一部分会被归类为不可穿越障碍物。为了提升轮式机器人在这些具有垂直挑战性地形的非平坦环境中的移动能力，我们提出了两种轮式平台，其与常规轮式机器人相比仅需极少的硬件修改；我们收集了轮式机器人在先前被视为不可穿越的垂直挑战性地形上攀爬的数据集，以促进数据驱动的运动控制；同时，我们提出了相关算法并展示其实验结果，证明传统轮式机器人在穿越垂直挑战性地形方面具有此前未被发掘的潜力。我们已将平台、数据集及算法公开，以推动轮式移动领域的未来研究。