arXiv subjects

Kasi Viswanath

Publications and source records attributed to Kasi Viswanath.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Learning Traversability-Aware Global Planners for Long Horizon Off-Road Navigation

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 self-supervised geometric priors from LiDAR. Alongside the model, we release a public dataset 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 $3.66\%$ of human path length and reduces operator interventions by $\sim\!85\%$ compared to local-planner-only autonomy.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Trailblazer: Learning offroad costmaps for long range planning

Autonomous navigation in off-road environments remains a significant challenge in field robotics, particularly for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) tasked with search and rescue, exploration, and surveillance. Effective long-range planning relies on the integration of onboard perception systems with prior environmental knowledge, such as satellite imagery and LiDAR data. This work introduces Trailblazer, a novel framework that automates the conversion of multi-modal sensor data into costmaps, enabling efficient path planning without manual tuning. Unlike traditional approaches, Trailblazer leverages imitation learning and a differentiable A* planner to learn costmaps directly from expert demonstrations, enhancing adaptability across diverse terrains. The proposed methodology was validated through extensive real-world testing, achieving robust performance in dynamic and complex environments, demonstrating Trailblazer's potential for scalable, efficient autonomous navigation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

GO: The Great Outdoors Multimodal Dataset

The Great Outdoors (GO) dataset is a multi-modal annotated data resource aimed at advancing ground robotics research in unstructured environments. Existing off-road datasets often lack sensor diversity and exclude vital modalities like thermal and radar that are critical for operation in degraded conditions (e.g., low visibility or adverse weather). To address these gaps, we introduce a large-scale multimodal off-road dataset with six complementary sensor modalities, along with semantic annotations and GPS traces, to support tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and SLAM. The diverse environmental conditions represented in the dataset present significant real-world challenges, which provide opportunities to develop more robust solutions to support the continued advancement of field robotics, autonomous exploration, and perception systems in natural environments. The dataset can be downloaded at: https://www.unmannedlab.org/the-great-outdoors-dataset/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Reflectivity Is All You Need!: Advancing LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

LiDAR semantic segmentation frameworks predominantly use geometry-based features to differentiate objects within a scan. Although these methods excel in scenarios with clear boundaries and distinct shapes, their performance declines in environments where boundaries are indistinct, particularly in off-road contexts. To address this issue, recent advances in 3D segmentation algorithms have aimed to leverage raw LiDAR intensity readings to improve prediction precision. However, despite these advances, existing learning-based models face challenges in linking the complex interactions between raw intensity and variables such as distance, incidence angle, material reflectivity, and atmospheric conditions. Building upon our previous work, this paper explores the advantages of employing calibrated intensity (also referred to as reflectivity) within learning-based LiDAR semantic segmentation frameworks. We start by demonstrating that adding reflectivity as input enhances the LiDAR semantic segmentation model by providing a better data representation. Extensive experimentation with the Rellis-3d off-road dataset shows that replacing intensity with reflectivity results in a 4\% improvement in mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) for off-road scenarios. We demonstrate the potential benefits of using calibrated intensity for semantic segmentation in urban environments (SemanticKITTI) and for cross-sensor domain adaptation. Additionally, we tested the Segment Anything Model (SAM) using reflectivity as input, resulting in improved segmentation masks for LiDAR images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Off-Road LiDAR Intensity Based Semantic Segmentation

LiDAR is used in autonomous driving to provide 3D spatial information and enable accurate perception in off-road environments, aiding in obstacle detection, mapping, and path planning. Learning-based LiDAR semantic segmentation utilizes machine learning techniques to automatically classify objects and regions in LiDAR point clouds. Learning-based models struggle in off-road environments due to the presence of diverse objects with varying colors, textures, and undefined boundaries, which can lead to difficulties in accurately classifying and segmenting objects using traditional geometric-based features. In this paper, we address this problem by harnessing the LiDAR intensity parameter to enhance object segmentation in off-road environments. Our approach was evaluated in the RELLIS-3D data set and yielded promising results as a preliminary analysis with improved mIoU for classes "puddle" and "grass" compared to more complex deep learning-based benchmarks. The methodology was evaluated for compatibility across both Velodyne and Ouster LiDAR systems, assuring its cross-platform applicability. This analysis advocates for the incorporation of calibrated intensity as a supplementary input, aiming to enhance the prediction accuracy of learning based semantic segmentation frameworks. https://github.com/MOONLABIISERB/lidar-intensity-predictor/tree/main

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

OFFSEG: A Semantic Segmentation Framework For Off-Road Driving

Off-road image semantic segmentation is challenging due to the presence of uneven terrains, unstructured class boundaries, irregular features and strong textures. These aspects affect the perception of the vehicle from which the information is used for path planning. Current off-road datasets exhibit difficulties like class imbalance and understanding of varying environmental topography. To overcome these issues we propose a framework for off-road semantic segmentation called as OFFSEG that involves (i) a pooled class semantic segmentation with four classes (sky, traversable region, non-traversable region and obstacle) using state-of-the-art deep learning architectures (ii) a colour segmentation methodology to segment out specific sub-classes (grass, puddle, dirt, gravel, etc.) from the traversable region for better scene understanding. The evaluation of the framework is carried out on two off-road driving datasets, namely, RELLIS-3D and RUGD. We have also tested proposed framework in IISERB campus frames. The results show that OFFSEG achieves good performance and also provides detailed information on the traversable region.

cs.CV↗