AnyNav: Visual Neuro-Symbolic Friction Learning for Off-road Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fu, Taimeng, Zhan, Zitong, Zhao, Zhipeng, Du, Yi, Su, Shaoshu, Lin, Xiao, Esfahani, Ehsan Tarkesh, Dantu, Karthik, Chowdhury, Souma, Wang, Chen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Fu, Taimeng
Zhan, Zitong
Zhao, Zhipeng
Du, Yi
Su, Shaoshu
Lin, Xiao
Esfahani, Ehsan Tarkesh
Dantu, Karthik
Chowdhury, Souma
Wang, Chen
author_facet Fu, Taimeng
Zhan, Zitong
Zhao, Zhipeng
Du, Yi
Su, Shaoshu
Lin, Xiao
Esfahani, Ehsan Tarkesh
Dantu, Karthik
Chowdhury, Souma
Wang, Chen
contents Off-road navigation is critical for a wide range of field robotics applications from planetary exploration to disaster response. However, it remains a longstanding challenge due to unstructured environments and the inherently complex terrain-vehicle interactions. Traditional physics-based methods struggle to accurately capture the nonlinear dynamics underlying these interactions, while purely data-driven approaches often overfit to specific motion patterns, vehicle geometries, or platforms, limiting their generalization in diverse, real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce AnyNav, a vision-based friction estimation and navigation framework grounded in neuro-symbolic principles. Our approach integrates neural networks for visual perception with symbolic physical models for reasoning about terrain-vehicle dynamics. To enable self-supervised learning in real-world settings, we adopt the imperative learning paradigm, employing bilevel optimization to train the friction network through physics-based optimization. This explicit incorporation of physical reasoning substantially enhances generalization across terrains, vehicle types, and operational conditions. Leveraging the predicted friction coefficients, we further develop a physics-informed navigation system capable of generating physically feasible, time-efficient paths together with corresponding speed profiles. We demonstrate that AnyNav seamlessly transfers from simulation to real-world robotic platforms, exhibiting strong robustness across different four-wheeled vehicles and diverse off-road environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_12654
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AnyNav: Visual Neuro-Symbolic Friction Learning for Off-road Navigation
Fu, Taimeng
Zhan, Zitong
Zhao, Zhipeng
Du, Yi
Su, Shaoshu
Lin, Xiao
Esfahani, Ehsan Tarkesh
Dantu, Karthik
Chowdhury, Souma
Wang, Chen
Robotics
Off-road navigation is critical for a wide range of field robotics applications from planetary exploration to disaster response. However, it remains a longstanding challenge due to unstructured environments and the inherently complex terrain-vehicle interactions. Traditional physics-based methods struggle to accurately capture the nonlinear dynamics underlying these interactions, while purely data-driven approaches often overfit to specific motion patterns, vehicle geometries, or platforms, limiting their generalization in diverse, real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce AnyNav, a vision-based friction estimation and navigation framework grounded in neuro-symbolic principles. Our approach integrates neural networks for visual perception with symbolic physical models for reasoning about terrain-vehicle dynamics. To enable self-supervised learning in real-world settings, we adopt the imperative learning paradigm, employing bilevel optimization to train the friction network through physics-based optimization. This explicit incorporation of physical reasoning substantially enhances generalization across terrains, vehicle types, and operational conditions. Leveraging the predicted friction coefficients, we further develop a physics-informed navigation system capable of generating physically feasible, time-efficient paths together with corresponding speed profiles. We demonstrate that AnyNav seamlessly transfers from simulation to real-world robotic platforms, exhibiting strong robustness across different four-wheeled vehicles and diverse off-road environments.
title AnyNav: Visual Neuro-Symbolic Friction Learning for Off-road Navigation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12654