SubTGraph: Large-Scale Subterranean Environment Synthesis with Controllable Topological Variability for Robotic Autonomy Validation

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Main Authors: Caso, F. Labra, Saradagi, A., Fredriksson, S., Nordström, S., Koval, A., Nikolakopoulos, G.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Caso, F. Labra
Saradagi, A.
Fredriksson, S.
Nordström, S.
Koval, A.
Nikolakopoulos, G.
author_facet Caso, F. Labra
Saradagi, A.
Fredriksson, S.
Nordström, S.
Koval, A.
Nikolakopoulos, G.
contents Subterranean (SubT) environments have been a frontier for autonomous robotics, driven by the push for automation of mining operations and the interest in planetary exploration (Martian Lava Tubes). Due to the challenges involved in accessing real SubT environments, rigorous hardening of autonomy stacks in realistic simulation environments is critical. This article fills a well-known gap, which relates to the unavailability of a large-scale simulation-based benchmarking infrastructure for rigorous statistical evaluation of robotic autonomy, due to which it is common for SubT research articles to present validation results in a few environments at best. This article presents SubTGraph, a novel framework for rapid synthesis of multi-level SubT environments with high variability, incorporating user specifications related to topology, dimensionality, textures, etc., to generate distinct environments such as operational mines, natural caves and lava tubes. SubTGraph builds a cost matrix from user-specified structural constraints to guide the classical Dijkstra algorithm to procedurally generate SubT worlds utilizing topometric tiles from the DARPA World Generator. Three robotics case-studies are investigated to demonstrate the utility of SubTGraph for rigorous validation of different layers in the robotic autonomy stack. Structural semantic segmentation is validated against topometric ground truths, multi-agent path planning is widely tested for identification of patterns and trends in the algorithm behavior and LIO SLAM is stress-tested in challenging subterranean sections to identify failure cases. The SubTGraph world creation codebase is open-sourced (https://github.com/LTU-RAI/SubTGraph.git) along with a database consisting of 150 highly variable underground worlds.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_20917
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SubTGraph: Large-Scale Subterranean Environment Synthesis with Controllable Topological Variability for Robotic Autonomy Validation
Caso, F. Labra
Saradagi, A.
Fredriksson, S.
Nordström, S.
Koval, A.
Nikolakopoulos, G.
Robotics
Subterranean (SubT) environments have been a frontier for autonomous robotics, driven by the push for automation of mining operations and the interest in planetary exploration (Martian Lava Tubes). Due to the challenges involved in accessing real SubT environments, rigorous hardening of autonomy stacks in realistic simulation environments is critical. This article fills a well-known gap, which relates to the unavailability of a large-scale simulation-based benchmarking infrastructure for rigorous statistical evaluation of robotic autonomy, due to which it is common for SubT research articles to present validation results in a few environments at best. This article presents SubTGraph, a novel framework for rapid synthesis of multi-level SubT environments with high variability, incorporating user specifications related to topology, dimensionality, textures, etc., to generate distinct environments such as operational mines, natural caves and lava tubes. SubTGraph builds a cost matrix from user-specified structural constraints to guide the classical Dijkstra algorithm to procedurally generate SubT worlds utilizing topometric tiles from the DARPA World Generator. Three robotics case-studies are investigated to demonstrate the utility of SubTGraph for rigorous validation of different layers in the robotic autonomy stack. Structural semantic segmentation is validated against topometric ground truths, multi-agent path planning is widely tested for identification of patterns and trends in the algorithm behavior and LIO SLAM is stress-tested in challenging subterranean sections to identify failure cases. The SubTGraph world creation codebase is open-sourced (https://github.com/LTU-RAI/SubTGraph.git) along with a database consisting of 150 highly variable underground worlds.
title SubTGraph: Large-Scale Subterranean Environment Synthesis with Controllable Topological Variability for Robotic Autonomy Validation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20917