RoadRunner -- Learning Traversability Estimation for Autonomous Off-road Driving

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Frey, Jonas, Patel, Manthan, Atha, Deegan, Nubert, Julian, Fan, David, Agha, Ali, Padgett, Curtis, Spieler, Patrick, Hutter, Marco, Khattak, Shehryar
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Frey, Jonas
Patel, Manthan
Atha, Deegan
Nubert, Julian
Fan, David
Agha, Ali
Padgett, Curtis
Spieler, Patrick
Hutter, Marco
Khattak, Shehryar
author_facet Frey, Jonas
Patel, Manthan
Atha, Deegan
Nubert, Julian
Fan, David
Agha, Ali
Padgett, Curtis
Spieler, Patrick
Hutter, Marco
Khattak, Shehryar
contents Autonomous navigation at high speeds in off-road environments necessitates robots to comprehensively understand their surroundings using onboard sensing only. The extreme conditions posed by the off-road setting can cause degraded camera image quality due to poor lighting and motion blur, as well as limited sparse geometric information available from LiDAR sensing when driving at high speeds. In this work, we present RoadRunner, a novel framework capable of predicting terrain traversability and an elevation map directly from camera and LiDAR sensor inputs. RoadRunner enables reliable autonomous navigation, by fusing sensory information, handling of uncertainty, and generation of contextually informed predictions about the geometry and traversability of the terrain while operating at low latency. In contrast to existing methods relying on classifying handcrafted semantic classes and using heuristics to predict traversability costs, our method is trained end-to-end in a self-supervised fashion. The RoadRunner network architecture builds upon popular sensor fusion network architectures from the autonomous driving domain, which embed LiDAR and camera information into a common Bird's Eye View perspective. Training is enabled by utilizing an existing traversability estimation stack to generate training data in hindsight in a scalable manner from real-world off-road driving datasets. Furthermore, RoadRunner improves the system latency by a factor of roughly 4, from 500 ms to 140 ms, while improving the accuracy for traversability costs and elevation map predictions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RoadRunner in enabling safe and reliable off-road navigation at high speeds in multiple real-world driving scenarios through unstructured desert environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_19341
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RoadRunner -- Learning Traversability Estimation for Autonomous Off-road Driving
Frey, Jonas
Patel, Manthan
Atha, Deegan
Nubert, Julian
Fan, David
Agha, Ali
Padgett, Curtis
Spieler, Patrick
Hutter, Marco
Khattak, Shehryar
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Autonomous navigation at high speeds in off-road environments necessitates robots to comprehensively understand their surroundings using onboard sensing only. The extreme conditions posed by the off-road setting can cause degraded camera image quality due to poor lighting and motion blur, as well as limited sparse geometric information available from LiDAR sensing when driving at high speeds. In this work, we present RoadRunner, a novel framework capable of predicting terrain traversability and an elevation map directly from camera and LiDAR sensor inputs. RoadRunner enables reliable autonomous navigation, by fusing sensory information, handling of uncertainty, and generation of contextually informed predictions about the geometry and traversability of the terrain while operating at low latency. In contrast to existing methods relying on classifying handcrafted semantic classes and using heuristics to predict traversability costs, our method is trained end-to-end in a self-supervised fashion. The RoadRunner network architecture builds upon popular sensor fusion network architectures from the autonomous driving domain, which embed LiDAR and camera information into a common Bird's Eye View perspective. Training is enabled by utilizing an existing traversability estimation stack to generate training data in hindsight in a scalable manner from real-world off-road driving datasets. Furthermore, RoadRunner improves the system latency by a factor of roughly 4, from 500 ms to 140 ms, while improving the accuracy for traversability costs and elevation map predictions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RoadRunner in enabling safe and reliable off-road navigation at high speeds in multiple real-world driving scenarios through unstructured desert environments.
title RoadRunner -- Learning Traversability Estimation for Autonomous Off-road Driving
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19341