# URA*: Uncertainty-aware Path Planning using Image-based Aerial-to-Ground Traversability Estimation for Off-road Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08814 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08814/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Generalised Dice overlap as a deep learning loss function for highly unbalanced segmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03237/) (2017)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [Road Extraction by Deep Residual U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10684/) (2017)
- [DeepGlobe 2018: A Challenge to Parse the Earth through Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06561/) (2018)
- [Perceive, Predict, and Plan: Safe Motion Planning Through Interpretable Semantic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05930/) (2020)
- [SegFix: Model-Agnostic Boundary Refinement for Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04269/) (2020)
- [LookOut: Diverse Multi-Future Prediction and Planning for Self-Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06547/) (2021)
- [Deep Hierarchical Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14335/) (2022)
- [Topology Preserving Local Road Network Estimation from Single Onboard Camera Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10155/) (2021)
- [ORFD: A Dataset and Benchmark for Off-Road Freespace Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09907/) (2022)
- [Search-based optimal motion planning for automated driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04868/) (2018)
- [On the Road to Online Adaptation for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16195/) (2022)
- [Learning Ground Traversability from Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05368/) (2017)
- [SPIN Road Mapper: Extracting Roads from Aerial Images via Spatial and Interaction Space Graph Reasoning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07701/) (2021)
- [DG-Labeler and DGL-MOTS Dataset: Boost the Autonomous Driving Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07790/) (2021)
- [Multi-Objective Path-Based D* Lite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00710/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Security Considerations in AI-Robotics: A Survey of Current Methods, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08565/) (2023)
- [Transfer Learning Applied to Computer Vision Problems: Survey on Current Progress, Limitations, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07736/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A major challenge with off-road autonomous navigation is the lack of maps or road markings that can be used to plan a path for autonomous robots. Classical path planning methods mostly assume a perfectly known environment without accounting for the inherent perception and sensing uncertainty from detecting terrain and obstacles in off-road environments. Recent work in computer vision and deep neural networks has advanced the capability of terrain traversability segmentation from raw images; however, the feasibility of using these noisy segmentation maps for navigation and path planning has not been adequately explored. To address this problem, this research proposes an uncertainty-aware path planning method, URA* using aerial images for autonomous navigation in off-road environments. An ensemble convolutional neural network (CNN) model is first used to perform pixel-level traversability estimation from aerial images of the region of interest. The traversability predictions are represented as a grid of traversal probability values. An uncertainty-aware planner is then applied to compute the best path from a start point to a goal point given these noisy traversal probability estimates. The proposed planner also incorporates replanning techniques to allow rapid replanning during online robot operation. The proposed method is evaluated on the Massachusetts Road Dataset, the DeepGlobe dataset, as well as a dataset of aerial images from off-road proving grounds at Mississippi State University. Results show that the proposed image segmentation and planning methods outperform conventional planning algorithms in terms of the quality and feasibility of the initial path, as well as the quality of replanned paths.