Given the huge amount of acquired information, the adversities all-terrain environments present to autonomous systems and the swiftness, thus required, from each of their navigation decisions, the 3-D perceptional system will be urged to map obstacles and passageways in the most swift and detailed manner. To tackle the problem, a hybrid approach is presented bringing the best of several methods together, combining the lightness of less meticulous analyses with the detail brought by more thorough ones. Realizing the former, a terrain’s slope mapping system upon a low resolute volumetric representa- tion of the surrounding occupancy. For the latter’s detailed evaluation, two novel metrics were conceived to discriminate the little depth discrepancies found in between range scanner’s beam distance measurements. The experimental results show the conjunction of these two representations providing a reliable answer to traversability mapping and a robust discrimination of penetrable vegetation from real obstructions. Two distinct robotic platforms served to test the hybrid approach on very different applications: an autonomous surface vehicle and a terrestrial four-wheeled robot.

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• Physical Sciences - Natural Sciences