Abstract:Traversability estimation is critical for enabling robots to navigate across diverse terrains and environments. While recent self-supervised learning methods achieve promising results, they often fail to capture the characteristics of non-traversable regions. Moreover, most prior works concentrate on a single modality, overlooking the complementary strengths offered by integrating heterogeneous sensory modalities for more robust traversability estimation. To address these limitations, we propose a multimodal self-supervised framework for traversability labeling and estimation. First, our annotation pipeline integrates footprint, LiDAR, and camera data as prompts for a vision foundation model, generating traversability labels that account for both semantic and geometric cues. Then, leveraging these labels, we train a dual-stream network that jointly learns from different modalities in a decoupled manner, enhancing its capacity to recognize diverse traversability patterns. In addition, we incorporate sparse LiDAR-based supervision to mitigate the noise introduced by pseudo labels. Finally, extensive experiments conducted across urban, off-road, and campus environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The proposed automatic labeling method consistently achieves around 88% IoU across diverse datasets. Compared to existing self-supervised state-of-the-art methods, our multimodal traversability estimation network yields consistently higher IoU, improving by 1.6-3.5% on all evaluated datasets.
Abstract:Service mobile robots are often required to avoid dynamic objects while performing their tasks, but they usually have only limited computational resources. So we present a lightweight multi-modal framework for 3D object detection and trajectory prediction. Our system synergistically integrates LiDAR and camera inputs to achieve real-time perception of pedestrians, vehicles, and riders in 3D space. The framework proposes two novel modules: 1) a Cross-Modal Deformable Transformer (CMDT) for object detection with high accuracy and acceptable amount of computation, and 2) a Reference Trajectory-based Multi-Class Transformer (RTMCT) for efficient and diverse trajectory prediction of mult-class objects with flexible trajectory lengths. Evaluations on the CODa benchmark demonstrate superior performance over existing methods across detection (+2.03% in mAP) and trajectory prediction (-0.408m in minADE5 of pedestrians) metrics. Remarkably, the system exhibits exceptional deployability - when implemented on a wheelchair robot with an entry-level NVIDIA 3060 GPU, it achieves real-time inference at 13.2 fps. To facilitate reproducibility and practical deployment, we release the related code of the method at https://github.com/TossherO/3D_Perception and its ROS inference version at https://github.com/TossherO/ros_packages.