Terrain Costmap Generation via Scaled Preference Conditioning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mao, Luisa, Warnell, Garrett, Stone, Peter, Biswas, Joydeep
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mao, Luisa
Warnell, Garrett
Stone, Peter
Biswas, Joydeep
author_facet Mao, Luisa
Warnell, Garrett
Stone, Peter
Biswas, Joydeep
contents Successful autonomous robot navigation in off-road domains requires the ability to generate high-quality terrain costmaps that are able to both generalize well over a wide variety of terrains and rapidly adapt relative costs at test time to meet mission-specific needs. Existing approaches for costmap generation allow for either rapid test-time adaptation of relative costs (e.g., semantic segmentation methods) or generalization to new terrain types (e.g., representation learning methods), but not both. In this work, we present scaled preference conditioned all-terrain costmap generation (SPACER), a novel approach for generating terrain costmaps that leverages synthetic data during training in order to generalize well to new terrains, and allows for rapid test-time adaptation of relative costs by conditioning on a user-specified scaled preference context. Using large-scale aerial maps, we provide empirical evidence that SPACER outperforms other approaches at generating costmaps for terrain navigation, with the lowest measured regret across varied preferences in five of seven environments for global path planning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_11529
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Terrain Costmap Generation via Scaled Preference Conditioning
Mao, Luisa
Warnell, Garrett
Stone, Peter
Biswas, Joydeep
Robotics
Successful autonomous robot navigation in off-road domains requires the ability to generate high-quality terrain costmaps that are able to both generalize well over a wide variety of terrains and rapidly adapt relative costs at test time to meet mission-specific needs. Existing approaches for costmap generation allow for either rapid test-time adaptation of relative costs (e.g., semantic segmentation methods) or generalization to new terrain types (e.g., representation learning methods), but not both. In this work, we present scaled preference conditioned all-terrain costmap generation (SPACER), a novel approach for generating terrain costmaps that leverages synthetic data during training in order to generalize well to new terrains, and allows for rapid test-time adaptation of relative costs by conditioning on a user-specified scaled preference context. Using large-scale aerial maps, we provide empirical evidence that SPACER outperforms other approaches at generating costmaps for terrain navigation, with the lowest measured regret across varied preferences in five of seven environments for global path planning.
title Terrain Costmap Generation via Scaled Preference Conditioning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11529