ForestTrav: Accurate, Efficient and Deployable Forest Traversability Estimation for Autonomous Ground Vehicles

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ruetz, Fabio, Lawrance, Nicholas, Hernández, Emili, Borges, Paulo, Peynot, Thierry
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Ruetz, Fabio
Lawrance, Nicholas
Hernández, Emili
Borges, Paulo
Peynot, Thierry
author_facet Ruetz, Fabio
Lawrance, Nicholas
Hernández, Emili
Borges, Paulo
Peynot, Thierry
contents Autonomous navigation in unstructured vegetated environments remains an open challenge. To successfully operate in these settings, ground vehicles must assess the traversability of the environment and determine which vegetation is pliable enough to push through. In this work, we propose a novel method that combines a high-fidelity and feature-rich 3D voxel representation while leveraging the structural context and sparseness of SCNN's to assess Traversability Estimation (TE) in densely vegetated environments. The proposed method is thoroughly evaluated on an accurately-labeled real-world data set that we provide to the community. It is shown to outperform state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin (0.59 vs. 0.39 MCC score at 0.1m voxel resolution) in challenging scenes and to generalize to unseen environments. In addition, the method is economical in the amount of training data and training time required: a model is trained in minutes on a desktop computer. We show that by exploiting the context of the environment, our method can use different feature combinations with only limited performance variations. For example, our approach can be used with lidar-only features, whilst still assessing complex vegetated environments accurately, which was not demonstrated previously in the literature in such environments. In addition, we propose an approach to assess a traversability estimator's sensitivity to information quality and show our method's sensitivity is low.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_12705
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ForestTrav: Accurate, Efficient and Deployable Forest Traversability Estimation for Autonomous Ground Vehicles
Ruetz, Fabio
Lawrance, Nicholas
Hernández, Emili
Borges, Paulo
Peynot, Thierry
Robotics
Autonomous navigation in unstructured vegetated environments remains an open challenge. To successfully operate in these settings, ground vehicles must assess the traversability of the environment and determine which vegetation is pliable enough to push through. In this work, we propose a novel method that combines a high-fidelity and feature-rich 3D voxel representation while leveraging the structural context and sparseness of SCNN's to assess Traversability Estimation (TE) in densely vegetated environments. The proposed method is thoroughly evaluated on an accurately-labeled real-world data set that we provide to the community. It is shown to outperform state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin (0.59 vs. 0.39 MCC score at 0.1m voxel resolution) in challenging scenes and to generalize to unseen environments. In addition, the method is economical in the amount of training data and training time required: a model is trained in minutes on a desktop computer. We show that by exploiting the context of the environment, our method can use different feature combinations with only limited performance variations. For example, our approach can be used with lidar-only features, whilst still assessing complex vegetated environments accurately, which was not demonstrated previously in the literature in such environments. In addition, we propose an approach to assess a traversability estimator's sensitivity to information quality and show our method's sensitivity is low.
title ForestTrav: Accurate, Efficient and Deployable Forest Traversability Estimation for Autonomous Ground Vehicles
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12705