From Simulation to Field: Learning Terrain Traversability for Real-World Deployment

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Atas, Fetullah, Cielniak, Grzegorz, Grimstad, Lars
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Atas, Fetullah
Cielniak, Grzegorz
Grimstad, Lars
author_facet Atas, Fetullah
Cielniak, Grzegorz
Grimstad, Lars
contents The challenge of traversability estimation is a crucial aspect of autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments such as forests. It involves determining whether certain areas are passable or risky for robots, taking into account factors like terrain irregularities, slopes, and potential obstacles. The majority of current methods for traversability estimation operate on the assumption of an offline computation, overlooking the significant influence of the robot's heading direction on accurate traversability estimates. In this work, we introduce a deep neural network that uses detailed geometric environmental data together with the robot's recent movement characteristics. This fusion enables the generation of robot direction awareness and continuous traversability estimates, essential for enhancing robot autonomy in challenging terrains like dense forests. The efficacy and significance of our approach are underscored by experiments conducted on both simulated and real robotic platforms in various environments, yielding quantitatively superior performance results compared to existing methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that our method, trained exclusively in a high-fidelity simulated setting, can accurately predict traversability in real-world applications without any real data collection. Our experiments showcase the advantages of our method for optimizing path-planning and exploration tasks within difficult outdoor environments, underscoring its practicality for effective, real-world robotic navigation. In the spirit of collaborative advancement, we have made the code implementation available to the public.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_06904
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Simulation to Field: Learning Terrain Traversability for Real-World Deployment
Atas, Fetullah
Cielniak, Grzegorz
Grimstad, Lars
Robotics
The challenge of traversability estimation is a crucial aspect of autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments such as forests. It involves determining whether certain areas are passable or risky for robots, taking into account factors like terrain irregularities, slopes, and potential obstacles. The majority of current methods for traversability estimation operate on the assumption of an offline computation, overlooking the significant influence of the robot's heading direction on accurate traversability estimates. In this work, we introduce a deep neural network that uses detailed geometric environmental data together with the robot's recent movement characteristics. This fusion enables the generation of robot direction awareness and continuous traversability estimates, essential for enhancing robot autonomy in challenging terrains like dense forests. The efficacy and significance of our approach are underscored by experiments conducted on both simulated and real robotic platforms in various environments, yielding quantitatively superior performance results compared to existing methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that our method, trained exclusively in a high-fidelity simulated setting, can accurately predict traversability in real-world applications without any real data collection. Our experiments showcase the advantages of our method for optimizing path-planning and exploration tasks within difficult outdoor environments, underscoring its practicality for effective, real-world robotic navigation. In the spirit of collaborative advancement, we have made the code implementation available to the public.
title From Simulation to Field: Learning Terrain Traversability for Real-World Deployment
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06904