학술논문

Learning Off-Road Terrain Traversability With Self-Supervisions Only
Document Type
Periodical
Author
Source
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE. 8(8):4617-4624 Aug, 2023
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Estimation
Visualization
Trajectory
Reliability
Laser radar
Annotations
Self-supervised learning
Semantic scene understanding
deep learning for visual perception
vision-based navigation
field robots
Language
ISSN
2377-3766
2377-3774
Abstract
Estimating the traversability of terrain should be reliable and accurate in diverse conditions for autonomous driving in off-road environments. However, learning-based approaches often yield unreliable results when confronted with unfamiliar contexts, and it is challenging to obtain manual annotations frequently for new circumstances. In this letter, we introduce a method for learning traversability from images that utilizes only self-supervision and no manual labels, enabling it to easily learn traversability in new circumstances. To this end, we first generate self-supervised traversability labels from past driving trajectories by labeling regions traversed by the vehicle as highly traversable. Using the self-supervised labels, we then train a neural network that identifies terrains that are safe to traverse from an image using a one-class classification algorithm. Additionally, we supplement the limitations of self-supervised labels by incorporating methods of self-supervised learning of visual representations. To conduct a comprehensive evaluation, we collect data in a variety of driving environments and perceptual conditions and show that our method produces reliable estimations in various environments. In addition, the experimental results validate that our method outperforms other self-supervised traversability estimation methods and achieves comparable performances with supervised learning methods trained on manually labeled data.