Robotics: Science and Systems XIX

TerrainNet: Visual Modeling of Complex Terrain for High-speed, Off-road Navigation

Xiangyun Meng, Nathan Hatch, Alexander Lambert, Anqi Li, Nolan Wagener, Matthew Schmittle, JoonHo Lee, Wentao Yuan, Zoey Chen, Sameul Deng, Greg Okopal, Dieter Fox, Byron Boots, Amirreza Shaban

Abstract:

Effective use of camera-based vision systems is essential for robust performance in autonomous off-road driving, particularly in the high-speed regime. Despite success in structured, on-road settings, current end-to-end approaches for scene prediction have yet to be successfully adapted for complex outdoor terrain. To this end, we present TerrainNet, a vision-based terrain perception system for semantic and geometric terrain prediction for aggressive, off-road navigation. The approach relies on several key insights and practical considerations for achieving reliable terrain modeling. The network includes a multi-headed output representation to capture fine- and coarse-grained terrain features necessary for estimating traversability. Accurate depth estimation is achieved using self-supervised depth completion with multi-view RGB and stereo inputs. Requirements for real-time performance and fast inference speeds are met using efficient, learned image feature projections. Furthermore, the model is trained on a large-scale, real-world off-road dataset collected across a variety of diverse outdoor environments. We show how TerrainNet can also be used for costmap prediction and provide a detailed framework for integration into a planning module. We demonstrate the performance of TerrainNet through extensive comparison to current state-of-the-art baselines for camera-only scene prediction. Finally, we showcase the effectiveness of integrating TerrainNet within a complete autonomous-driving stack by conducting a real-world vehicle test in a challenging off-road scenario.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Meng-RSS-23, 
    AUTHOR    = {Xiangyun Meng AND Nathan Hatch AND Alexander Lambert AND Anqi Li AND Nolan Wagener AND Matthew Schmittle AND JoonHo Lee AND Wentao Yuan AND Zoey Chen AND Sameul Deng AND Greg Okopal AND Dieter Fox AND Byron Boots AND Amirreza Shaban}, 
    TITLE     = {{TerrainNet: Visual Modeling of Complex Terrain for High-speed, Off-road Navigation}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2023}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Daegu, Republic of Korea}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2023.XIX.103} 
}