# G-VOM: A GPU Accelerated Voxel Off-Road Mapping System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13176 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13176/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [RoadRunner -- Learning Traversability Estimation for Autonomous Off-road Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19341/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Traversability Prediction by Learning to Reconstruct Safe Terrain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01329/) (2022)
- [EVORA: Deep Evidential Traversability Learning for Risk-Aware Off-Road Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06234/) (2023)
- [Risk-Aware Off-Road Navigation via a Learned Speed Distribution Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13429/) (2022)
- [Pixel to Elevation: Learning to Predict Elevation Maps at Long Range using Images for Autonomous Offroad Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17484/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Semantic Learning for Robust Multi-Biome 3D Semantic Mapping in Off-Road Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06632/) (2024)
- [3DTTNet: Multimodal Fusion-Based 3D Traversable Terrain Modeling for Off-Road Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08195/) (2024)
- [Next-Best-Trajectory Planning of Robot Manipulators for Effective Observation and Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22588/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a local 3D voxel mapping framework for off-road path planning and navigation. Our method provides both hard and soft positive obstacle detection, negative obstacle detection, slope estimation, and roughness estimation. By using a 3D array lookup table data structure and by leveraging the GPU it can provide online performance. We then demonstrate the system working on three vehicles, a Clearpath Robotics Warthog, Moose, and a Polaris Ranger, and compare against a set of pre-recorded waypoints. This was done at 4.5 m/s in autonomous operation and 12 m/s in manual operation with a map update rate of 10 Hz. Finally, an open-source ROS implementation is provided. https://github.com/unmannedlab/G-VOM