MTG: Mapless Trajectory Generator with Traversability Coverage for Outdoor Navigation
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We present a novel learning algorithm for trajectory generation for outdoor robot navigation. Our goal is to compute collision-free paths that also satisfies the environment-specific traversability constraints. Our approach is designed for global planning using limited onboard robot perception in mapless environments and ensures comprehensive coverage of all traversable directions. Our formulation uses a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) generative model that is enhanced with traversability constraints and an optimization formulation used for the coverage. We highlight the benefits of our approach over state-of-the-art trajectory generation approaches and demonstrate its performance in challenging outdoor environments, including around buildings, across intersections, along trails, and in off-road terrain, using a Clearpath Husky and a Boston Dynamics Spot robot. In practice, our approach results in a 6 trajectory portions residing in non-traversable regions.
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