Do You Know the Way? Human-in-the-Loop Understanding for Fast Traversability Estimation in Mobile Robotics

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Schreiber, Andre, Driggs-Campbell, Katherine
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Schreiber, Andre
Driggs-Campbell, Katherine
author_facet Schreiber, Andre
Driggs-Campbell, Katherine
contents The increasing use of robots in unstructured environments necessitates the development of effective perception and navigation strategies to enable field robots to successfully perform their tasks. In particular, it is key for such robots to understand where in their environment they can and cannot travel -- a task known as traversability estimation. However, existing geometric approaches to traversability estimation may fail to capture nuanced representations of traversability, whereas vision-based approaches typically either involve manually annotating a large number of images or require robot experience. In addition, existing methods can struggle to address domain shifts as they typically do not learn during deployment. To this end, we propose a human-in-the-loop (HiL) method for traversability estimation that prompts a human for annotations as-needed. Our method uses a foundation model to enable rapid learning on new annotations and to provide accurate predictions even when trained on a small number of quickly-provided HiL annotations. We extensively validate our method in simulation and on real-world data, and demonstrate that it can provide state-of-the-art traversability prediction performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_19851
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do You Know the Way? Human-in-the-Loop Understanding for Fast Traversability Estimation in Mobile Robotics
Schreiber, Andre
Driggs-Campbell, Katherine
Robotics
The increasing use of robots in unstructured environments necessitates the development of effective perception and navigation strategies to enable field robots to successfully perform their tasks. In particular, it is key for such robots to understand where in their environment they can and cannot travel -- a task known as traversability estimation. However, existing geometric approaches to traversability estimation may fail to capture nuanced representations of traversability, whereas vision-based approaches typically either involve manually annotating a large number of images or require robot experience. In addition, existing methods can struggle to address domain shifts as they typically do not learn during deployment. To this end, we propose a human-in-the-loop (HiL) method for traversability estimation that prompts a human for annotations as-needed. Our method uses a foundation model to enable rapid learning on new annotations and to provide accurate predictions even when trained on a small number of quickly-provided HiL annotations. We extensively validate our method in simulation and on real-world data, and demonstrate that it can provide state-of-the-art traversability prediction performance.
title Do You Know the Way? Human-in-the-Loop Understanding for Fast Traversability Estimation in Mobile Robotics
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19851