mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Environments: How Far Have We Come?

arXiv 2410.07701 ↗First posted 10 Oct 2024cs.ROcited by 7

On the map: End-to-end autonomous driving → Generative simulation for driving

Abstract (arXiv)

Research on autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments is less advanced than in structured urban settings due to challenges like environmental diversities and scene complexity. These environments-such as rural areas and rugged terrains-pose unique obstacles that are not common in structured urban areas. Despite these difficulties, autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments is crucial for applications in agriculture, mining, and military operations. Our survey reviews over 250 papers for autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments, covering offline mapping, pose estimation, environmental perception, path planning, end-to-end autonomous driving, datasets, and relevant challenges. We also discuss emerging trends and future research directions. This review aims to consolidate knowledge and encourage further research for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. To support ongoing work, we maintain an active repository with up-to-date literature and open-source projects at: https://github.com/chaytonmin/Survey-Autonomous-Driving-in-Unstructured-Environments.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Generative simulation for driving, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving. Builds on 92 of its 254 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2024.

Builds on

92 of 254 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024DriveWorld: 4D Pre-trained Scene Understanding via World Models for Autonomous Driving7 May

Other references · 91

  1. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  2. 2016PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentationcited by 5,223
  3. 2019nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous drivingcited by 4,485
  4. 2016Pyramid Scene Parsing Networkcited by 2,472
  5. 2019Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Datasetcited by 2,436
  6. 2017CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulatorcited by 2,431
  7. 2016End to End Learning for Self-Driving Carscited by 1,000
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  9. 2018BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentationcited by 645
  10. 2014Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFscited by 552
  11. 2023End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontierscited by 485
  12. 2017VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimatorcited by 418
38 more
  1. 2015Recent Advances in Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 360
  2. 2020LIO-SAM: Tightly-coupled Lidar Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mappingcited by 185
  3. 2021FAST-LIO2: Fast Direct LiDAR-inertial Odometrycited by 170
  4. 2018IDD: A Dataset for Exploring Problems of Autonomous Navigation in Unconstrained Environmentscited by 163
  5. 2020RELLIS-3D Dataset: Data, Benchmarks and Analysiscited by 118
  6. 2020Cylinder3D: An Effective 3D Framework for Driving-scene LiDAR Semantic Segmentationcited by 112
  7. 2024Is Sora a World Simulator? A Comprehensive Survey on General World Models and Beyondcited by 111
  8. 2021Scan Context++: Structural Place Recognition Robust to Rotation and Lateral Variations in Urban Environmentscited by 72
  9. 2021AA-RMVSNet: Adaptive Aggregation Recurrent Multi-view Stereo Networkcited by 71
  10. 2020SNE-RoadSeg: Incorporating Surface Normal Information into Semantic Segmentation for Accurate Freespace Detectioncited by 66
  11. 2022Occupancy-MAE: Self-supervised Pre-training Large-scale LiDAR Point Clouds with Masked Occupancy Autoencoderscited by 57
  12. 2022STS: Surround-view Temporal Stereo for Multi-view 3D Detectioncited by 53
  13. 2021R3LIVE: A Robust, Real-time, RGB-colored, LiDAR-Inertial-Visual tightly-coupled state Estimation and mapping packagecited by 49
  14. 2022TartanDrive: A Large-Scale Dataset for Learning Off-Road Dynamics Modelscited by 48
  15. 2021LVI-SAM: Tightly-coupled Lidar-Visual-Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mappingcited by 44
  16. 2023The GOOSE Dataset for Perception in Unstructured Environmentscited by 36
  17. 2022ORFD: A Dataset and Benchmark for Off-Road Freespace Detectioncited by 33
  18. 2021Direct LiDAR Odometry: Fast Localization with Dense Point Cloudscited by 29
  19. 2023V-STRONG: Visual Self-Supervised Traversability Learning for Off-road Navigationcited by 28
  20. 2020MAPPER: Multi-Agent Path Planning with Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning in Mixed Dynamic Environmentscited by 26
  21. 2023Learning Off-Road Terrain Traversability with Self-Supervisions Onlycited by 24
  22. 2024RoadRunner -- Learning Traversability Estimation for Autonomous Off-road Drivingcited by 23
  23. 2020Multi-agent Motion Planning for Dense and Dynamic Environments via Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 21
  24. 2022ScaTE: A Scalable Framework for Self-Supervised Traversability Estimation in Unstructured Environmentscited by 21
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  27. 2021TERP: Reliable Planning in Uneven Outdoor Environments using Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 19
  28. 2022X-ICP: Localizability-Aware LiDAR Registration for Robust Localization in Extreme Environmentscited by 19
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  30. 2021A Fine-Grained Dataset and its Efficient Semantic Segmentation for Unstructured Driving Scenarioscited by 18
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  38. 2019Off-road Autonomous Vehicles Traversability Analysis and Trajectory Planning Based on Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learningcited by 13

50 most cited of 91 All 91 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 5; 2026: 2.

7 papers.

  1. 2025Advancing Off-Road Autonomous Driving: The Large-Scale ORAD-3D Dataset and Comprehensive Benchmarkscited by 8
  2. 2025SA-Occ: Satellite-Assisted 3D Occupancy Prediction in Real Worldcited by 2
  3. 2025DriveMRP: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Synthetic Motion Data for Motion Risk Predictioncited by 2
  4. 2025NOVA: Navigation via Object-Centric Visual Autonomy for High-Speed Target Tracking in Unstructured GPS-Denied Environmentscited by 1
  5. 2025Beyond Endpoints: Path-Centric Reasoning for Vectorized Off-Road Network Extractioncited by 0
  6. 2026Performance Analysis of YOLOv11 and YOLOv8 for Mixed Traffic Object Detection under Adverse Weather Conditions in Developing Countriescited by 0
  7. 2026UnsDrive: Towards Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Scenescited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Maps for Autonomous Driving: Full-process Survey and Frontiers
  2. 2026Autoware in Construction: Gap Analysis and LiDAR Perception Toward Off-Road Autonomous Driving
  3. 2026From Virtual Environments to Real-World Trials: Emerging Trends in Autonomous Driving
  4. 2025The Role of World Models in Shaping Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey
  5. 2025Learning-based 3D Reconstruction in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey
  6. 2024A Comprehensive Review of 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving: Technological Advances and Future Directions
  7. 2024World Models for Autonomous Driving: An Initial Survey
  8. 2025Spatial Retrieval Augmented Autonomous Driving