Self-Supervised Costmap Learning for Off-Road Vehicle Traversability

August 2023

Self-Supervised Costmap Learning for Off-Road Vehicle Traversability


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 build an accurate physics model, or 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 in the costmap prediction pipeline. We validate our method in multiple short and large-scale navigation tasks on a large, autonomous all-terrain vehicle (ATV) on challenging off-road terrains, and demonstrate ease of integration on a separate large ground robot. 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 interactions between the robot and different terrain types, such as grass and gravel. 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.

Notes:

@mastersthesis{Guaman Castro-2023-137556,
author = {Mateo Guaman Castro},
title = {Self-Supervised Costmap Learning for Off-Road Vehicle Traversability},
year = {2023},
month = {August},
school = {Carnegie Mellon University},
address = {Pittsburgh, PA},
number = {CMU-RI-TR-23-44},
keywords = {Robot Learning, Field Robotics, Traversability, Self-Supervised, Cross-Modal, Navigation, Off-Road, Costmap, Learning},
}
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