Related papers: VERN: Vegetation-aware Robot Navigation in Dense U…
We present VAPOR, a novel method for autonomous legged robot navigation in unstructured, densely vegetated outdoor environments using offline Reinforcement Learning (RL). Our method trains a novel RL policy using an actor-critic network and…
In many applications, robots are increasingly deployed in unstructured and natural environments where they encounter various types of vegetation. Vegetation presents unique challenges as a traversable obstacle, where the mechanical…
In this paper, we introduce a novel method for safe navigation in agricultural robotics. As global environmental challenges intensify, robotics offers a powerful solution to reduce chemical usage while meeting the increasing demands for…
We present a novel system, AdVENTR for autonomous robot navigation in unstructured outdoor environments that consist of uneven and vegetated terrains. Our approach is general and can enable both wheeled and legged robots to handle outdoor…
This paper describes a method of estimating the traversability of plant parts covering a path and navigating through them for mobile robots operating in plant-rich environments. Conventional mobile robots rely on scene recognition methods…
Natural environments such as forests and grasslands are challenging for robotic navigation because of the false perception of rigid obstacles from high grass, twigs, or bushes. In this work, we propose Wild Visual Navigation (WVN), an…
Natural environments such as forests and grasslands are challenging for robotic navigation because of the false perception of rigid obstacles from high grass, twigs, or bushes. In this work, we present Wild Visual Navigation (WVN), an…
Accurate traversability estimation is essential for safe and effective navigation of outdoor robots operating in complex environments. This paper introduces a novel experience-based method that allows robots to autonomously learn which…
Navigating densely vegetated environments poses significant challenges for autonomous ground vehicles. Learning-based systems typically use prior and in-situ data to predict terrain traversability but often degrade in performance when…
Autonomous navigation in unstructured vegetated environments remains an open challenge. To successfully operate in these settings, ground vehicles must assess the traversability of the environment and determine which vegetation is pliable…
Motion planning in off-road environments requires reasoning about both the geometry and semantics of the scene (e.g., a robot may be able to drive through soft bushes but not a fallen log). In many recent works, the world is classified into…
Traversability estimation in rugged, unstructured environments remains a challenging problem in field robotics. Often, the need for precise, accurate traversability estimation is in direct opposition to the limited sensing and compute…
The challenge of traversability estimation is a crucial aspect of autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments such as forests. It involves determining whether certain areas are passable or risky for robots, taking into…
We propose a learning-based navigation system for reaching visually indicated goals and demonstrate this system on a real mobile robot platform. Learning provides an appealing alternative to conventional methods for robotic navigation:…
We present a novel trajectory traversability estimation and planning algorithm for robot navigation in complex outdoor environments. We incorporate multimodal sensory inputs from an RGB camera, 3D LiDAR, and the robot's odometry sensor to…
We present a novel autonomous robot navigation algorithm for outdoor environments that is capable of handling diverse terrain traversability conditions. Our approach, VLM-GroNav, uses vision-language models (VLMs) and integrates them with…
Accurate and robust navigation in unstructured environments requires fusing data from multiple sensors. Such fusion ensures that the robot is better aware of its surroundings, including areas of the environment that are not immediately…
Fast and accurate path planning is important for ground robots to achieve safe and efficient autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments. However, most existing methods exploiting either 2D or 2.5D maps struggle to balance…
This work tackles scene understanding for outdoor robotic navigation, solely relying on images captured by an on-board camera. Conventional visual scene understanding interprets the environment based on specific descriptive categories.…
Wheeled robot navigation has been widely used in urban environments, but little research has been conducted on its navigation in wild vegetation. External sensors (LiDAR, camera etc.) are often used to construct point cloud map of the…