Off-Road Navigation via Implicit Neural Representation of Terrain Traversability

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jia, Yixuan, Li, Qingyuan, How, Jonathan P.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Jia, Yixuan
Li, Qingyuan
How, Jonathan P.
author_facet Jia, Yixuan
Li, Qingyuan
How, Jonathan P.
contents Autonomous off-road navigation requires robots to estimate terrain traversability from onboard sensors and plan motion accordingly. Conventional approaches typically rely on sampling-based planners such as MPPI to generate short-term control actions that aim to minimize traversal time and risk measures derived from the traversability estimates. These planners can react quickly but optimize only over a short look-ahead window, limiting their ability to reason about the full path geometry, which is important for navigating in challenging off-road environments. Moreover, they lack the ability to adjust speed based on the terrain-induced vibrations, which is important for smooth navigation on challenging terrains. In this paper, we introduce TRAIL (Traversability with an Implicit Learned Representation), an off-road navigation framework that leverages an implicit neural representation to model terrain properties as a continuous field that can be queried at arbitrary locations. This representation yields spatial gradients that enable integration with a novel gradient-based trajectory optimization method that adapts the path geometry and speed profile based on terrain traversability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18183
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Off-Road Navigation via Implicit Neural Representation of Terrain Traversability
Jia, Yixuan
Li, Qingyuan
How, Jonathan P.
Robotics
Autonomous off-road navigation requires robots to estimate terrain traversability from onboard sensors and plan motion accordingly. Conventional approaches typically rely on sampling-based planners such as MPPI to generate short-term control actions that aim to minimize traversal time and risk measures derived from the traversability estimates. These planners can react quickly but optimize only over a short look-ahead window, limiting their ability to reason about the full path geometry, which is important for navigating in challenging off-road environments. Moreover, they lack the ability to adjust speed based on the terrain-induced vibrations, which is important for smooth navigation on challenging terrains. In this paper, we introduce TRAIL (Traversability with an Implicit Learned Representation), an off-road navigation framework that leverages an implicit neural representation to model terrain properties as a continuous field that can be queried at arbitrary locations. This representation yields spatial gradients that enable integration with a novel gradient-based trajectory optimization method that adapts the path geometry and speed profile based on terrain traversability.
title Off-Road Navigation via Implicit Neural Representation of Terrain Traversability
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18183