Reasoning About Traversability: Language-Guided Off-Road 3D Trajectory Planning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Park, Byounggun, Hwang, Soonmin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Park, Byounggun
Hwang, Soonmin
author_facet Park, Byounggun
Hwang, Soonmin
contents While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable high-level semantic reasoning for end-to-end autonomous driving, particularly in unstructured environments, existing off-road datasets suffer from language annotations that are weakly aligned with vehicle actions and terrain geometry. To address this misalignment, we propose a language refinement framework that restructures annotations into action-aligned pairs, enabling a VLM to generate refined scene descriptions and 3D future trajectories directly from a single image. To further encourage terrain-aware planning, we introduce a preference optimization strategy that constructs geometry-aware hard negatives and explicitly penalizes trajectories inconsistent with local elevation profiles. Furthermore, we propose off-road-specific metrics to quantify traversability compliance and elevation consistency, addressing the limitations of conventional on-road evaluation. Experiments on the ORAD-3D benchmark demonstrate that our approach reduces average trajectory error from 1.01m to 0.97m, improves traversability compliance from 0.621 to 0.644, and decreases elevation inconsistency from 0.428 to 0.322, highlighting the efficacy of action-aligned supervision and terrain-aware optimization for robust off-road driving.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_21249
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reasoning About Traversability: Language-Guided Off-Road 3D Trajectory Planning
Park, Byounggun
Hwang, Soonmin
Robotics
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable high-level semantic reasoning for end-to-end autonomous driving, particularly in unstructured environments, existing off-road datasets suffer from language annotations that are weakly aligned with vehicle actions and terrain geometry. To address this misalignment, we propose a language refinement framework that restructures annotations into action-aligned pairs, enabling a VLM to generate refined scene descriptions and 3D future trajectories directly from a single image. To further encourage terrain-aware planning, we introduce a preference optimization strategy that constructs geometry-aware hard negatives and explicitly penalizes trajectories inconsistent with local elevation profiles. Furthermore, we propose off-road-specific metrics to quantify traversability compliance and elevation consistency, addressing the limitations of conventional on-road evaluation. Experiments on the ORAD-3D benchmark demonstrate that our approach reduces average trajectory error from 1.01m to 0.97m, improves traversability compliance from 0.621 to 0.644, and decreases elevation inconsistency from 0.428 to 0.322, highlighting the efficacy of action-aligned supervision and terrain-aware optimization for robust off-road driving.
title Reasoning About Traversability: Language-Guided Off-Road 3D Trajectory Planning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21249