Research on autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments is less advanced than in structured urban settings due to challenges like environmental diversities and scene complexity. These environments-such as rural areas and rugged terrains-pose unique obstacles that are not common in structured urban areas. Despite these difficulties, autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments is crucial for applications in agriculture, mining, and military operations. Our survey reviews over 250 papers for autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments, covering offline mapping, pose estimation, environmental perception, path planning, end-to-end autonomous driving, datasets, and relevant challenges. We also discuss emerging trends and future research directions. This review aims to consolidate knowledge and encourage further research for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. To support ongoing work, we maintain an active repository with up-to-date literature and open-source projects at: https://github.com/chaytonmin/Survey-Autonomous-Driving-in-Unstructured-Environments.
@article{arxiv.2410.07701,
title = {Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Environments: How Far Have We Come?},
author = {Chen Min and Shubin Si and Xu Wang and Hanzhang Xue and Weizhong Jiang and Zitong Chen and Mengmeng Li and Jilin Mei and Erke Shang and Zhipeng Xiao and Bin Dai and Qi Zhu and Hao Fu and Dawei Zhao and Liang Xiao and Yiming Nie and Yu Hu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.07701},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Accepted by Journal of Field Robotics (JFR) 2025; Survey paper; 59 pages