Learning Traversability for Long Horizon Off-Road Navigation

Abstract

Autonomous navigation across large off-road environments remains a challenging problem. Onboard sensors perceive only the immediate surroundings, yet safe and efficient routes depend on terrain features that extend well beyond the sensor horizon. Geo-spatial data sources such as satellite imagery, aerial LiDAR, and vector maps can close this gap, but learning traversability from them is difficult: dense labels are unavailable at scale, and existing methods rely on short-range sensing. We propose an efficient formulation that learns a continuous traversability map from overhead data, supervised directly by human-driven GPS trajectories and shaped by supervised geometric priors from LiDAR. Alongside the model, we release a dataset, curated from public sources, consisting of 299 scenes spanning $\sim\!1{,}244\,\mathrm{km}^{2}$ of diverse terrain, paired with $1{,}130\,\mathrm{km}$ of human driving. In field trials on a Clearpath Warthog across seven routes at two sites,our method achieves trajectories within $5.5\%$ of human path length and reduces operator interventions by $\sim\!85\%$ compared to local-planner-only autonomy.