How Does It Feel? Self-Supervised Costmap Learning for Off-Road Vehicle Traversability

May 2023

How Does It Feel? Self-Supervised Costmap Learning for Off-Road Vehicle Traversability

Authors:

Mateo Guaman Castro, Samuel Triest, Wenshan Wang, Jason M. Gregory, Felix Sanchez, John G. Rogers III, and Sebastian Scherer
Conference Paper
Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation

Abstract:

Estimating terrain traversability in off-road environments requires reasoning about complex interaction dynamics between the robot and these terrains. However, it is challenging to create informative labels to learn a model in a supervised manner for these interactions. We propose a method that learns to predict traversability costmaps by combining exteroceptive environmental information with proprioceptive terrain interaction feedback in a self-supervised manner. Additionally, we propose a novel way of incorporating robot velocity into the costmap prediction pipeline. We validate our method in multiple short and large-scale navigation tasks on challenging off-road terrains using two different large, all-terrain robots. Our short-scale navigation results show that using our learned costmaps leads to overall smoother navigation, and provides the robot with a more fine-grained understanding of the robot-terrain interactions. Our large-scale navigation trials show that we can reduce the number of interventions by up to 57% compared to an occupancy-based navigation baseline in challenging off-road courses ranging from 400 m to 3150 m. Appendix and full experiment videos can be found in our website: https://mateoguaman.github.io/hdif.
@conference{Guaman Castro-2023-137559,
author = {Mateo Guaman Castro And Samuel Triest And Wenshan Wang And Jason M. Gregory And Felix Sanchez And John G. Rogers III And Sebastian Scherer},
title = {How Does It Feel? Self-Supervised Costmap Learning for Off-Road Vehicle Traversability},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
year = {2023},
month = {May},
keywords = {Robot Learning, Field Robotics, Traversability, Self-Supervised, Cross-Modal, Navigation, Off-Road, Costmap, Learning},
}
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