CUTE-Planner: Confidence-aware Uneven Terrain Exploration Planner

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Park, Miryeong, Cho, Dongjin, Kim, Sanghyun, Cho, Younggun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Park, Miryeong
Cho, Dongjin
Kim, Sanghyun
Cho, Younggun
author_facet Park, Miryeong
Cho, Dongjin
Kim, Sanghyun
Cho, Younggun
contents Planetary exploration robots must navigate uneven terrain while building reliable maps for space missions. However, most existing methods incorporate traversability constraints but may not handle high uncertainty in elevation estimates near complex features like craters, do not consider exploration strategies for uncertainty reduction, and typically fail to address how elevation uncertainty affects navigation safety and map quality. To address the problems, we propose a framework integrating safe path generation, adaptive confidence updates, and confidence-aware exploration strategies. Using Kalman-based elevation estimation, our approach generates terrain traversability and confidence scores, then incorporates them into Graph-Based exploration Planner (GBP) to prioritize exploration of traversable low-confidence regions. We evaluate our framework through simulated lunar experiments using a novel low-confidence region ratio metric, achieving 69% uncertainty reduction compared to baseline GBP. In terms of mission success rate, our method achieves 100% while baseline GBP achieves 0%, demonstrating improvements in exploration safety and map reliability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12984
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CUTE-Planner: Confidence-aware Uneven Terrain Exploration Planner
Park, Miryeong
Cho, Dongjin
Kim, Sanghyun
Cho, Younggun
Robotics
Planetary exploration robots must navigate uneven terrain while building reliable maps for space missions. However, most existing methods incorporate traversability constraints but may not handle high uncertainty in elevation estimates near complex features like craters, do not consider exploration strategies for uncertainty reduction, and typically fail to address how elevation uncertainty affects navigation safety and map quality. To address the problems, we propose a framework integrating safe path generation, adaptive confidence updates, and confidence-aware exploration strategies. Using Kalman-based elevation estimation, our approach generates terrain traversability and confidence scores, then incorporates them into Graph-Based exploration Planner (GBP) to prioritize exploration of traversable low-confidence regions. We evaluate our framework through simulated lunar experiments using a novel low-confidence region ratio metric, achieving 69% uncertainty reduction compared to baseline GBP. In terms of mission success rate, our method achieves 100% while baseline GBP achieves 0%, demonstrating improvements in exploration safety and map reliability.
title CUTE-Planner: Confidence-aware Uneven Terrain Exploration Planner
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12984