CMP-IRRT*: A Perception-Assisted Height-Adaptive Planner for Quadruped Robots

Abstract

Quadruped robots can traverse low obstacles, but many 2D planning pipelines still model obstacles as binary occupied regions and rely on sampling-based search that can be inefficient under a limited budget. We propose a perception-assisted height-adaptive planning framework based on CMP-IRRT*, a Channel Mamba PointNet-guided Informed RRT* planner. Given a calibrated top-view RGB observation, the perception module estimates obstacle regions and converts depth predictions into a ground-relative height map. The planner then performs height-conditioned collision checking, treating high obstacles as blocked while allowing low obstacles to be traversed, and uses the CMP guide to bias sampling toward promising regions while retaining standard free-space and informed sampling fallbacks. Experiments on 2D planning benchmarks show that CMP-IRRT* reduces explored nodes and iterations compared with classical and neural-guided baselines, and a controlled ablation supports the contribution of the Mamba-based guide. In constructed traversability-aware scenarios, the proposed planner reduces path length by up to 16.3% when low obstacles are traversable, and a Unitree Go2 demonstration further shows executable bypassing and traversal behaviors. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MingfanZhao/height-adaptive-planner.