English

A Terrain-Adaptive epsilon-Constraint MPC for Uneven Terrain Kinodynamic Planning

Robotics 2026-05-21 v1

Abstract

Kinodynamic planning for car-like vehicles on uneven terrain requires simultaneously optimizing competing objectives such as path efficiency and pose stability. This work presents an adaptive epsilon-constraint method integrated into a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework, where the epsilon bounds are dynamically adjusted based on terrain descriptors to explore the Pareto front in real time. To capture vehicle-terrain dynamics, we develop a semi-parametric model combining analytical vehicle dynamics with a Sparse Gaussian Process (SGP) trained on the same terrain descriptors. The proposed epsilon-MPC is evaluated against MPPI and GAKD baselines, achieving a 94% navigation success rate while reducing maximum orientation deviation by 24% and improving multi-objective trade-off quality by 23%.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.21188,
  title  = {A Terrain-Adaptive epsilon-Constraint MPC for Uneven Terrain Kinodynamic Planning},
  author = {Otobong Jerome and Geesara Kalathunga and Tiago Nascimento},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.21188},
  year   = {2026}
}