When Obstacles Bend: Modeling Vegetation Deformation in the context of Field Robotics
2026-08-26 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors explain that robots moving through natural areas often have to go through plants, but current ways to measure how easy this is depend too much on the robot itself. This makes it hard to use the measures for different robots and doesn’t clearly describe the plants' own properties. They suggest a new method to study the plants by measuring how much they bend and the forces involved, which tells us about the plants’ mechanical traits. This helps robots navigate using info about the plants themselves instead of relying on the robot’s experience.
autonomous robotstraversabilitymechanical propertiesvegetationdeformation measurementcontact forceenvironmental monitoringagriculture roboticsrobot navigationplatform-independent
Authors
Muhammad Hsaeeb Zaar Khizar, Tom Montagnon, Roland Lenain, Romuald Aufrère, Johann Laconte
Abstract
Autonomous robots operating in natural environments must often interact with vegetation rather than simply avoid it. In this context, traversability is typically defined from the robot's perspective, by measuring how a specific platform responds when moving through the environment. While practical, this viewpoint entangles the assessment of the environment with the robot's own dynamics, making the resulting characterization difficult to transfer across different platforms. More importantly, it does not directly reflect the properties of the vegetation itself, which are the true source of interaction and potential damage in applications such as agriculture and environmental monitoring. To address this limitation, we propose to characterize vegetation through its intrinsic mechanical properties, independently of any specific robot. By combining deformation measurements with contact force data, we estimate the underlying mechanical parameters and reconstruct the vegetation's response to interaction. This enables vegetation-aware navigation based on intrinsic environmental properties rather than platform-dependent metrics.