STATE-NAV: Stability-Aware Traversability Estimation for Bipedal Navigation on Rough Terrain

Abstract

Bipedal robots have advantages in maneuvering human-centered environments, but face greater failure risk compared to other stable mobile platforms, such as wheeled or quadrupedal robots. While learning-based traversability has been widely studied for these platforms, bipedal traversability has instead relied on manually designed rules with limited consideration of locomotion stability on rough terrain. In this work, we present the first learning-based traversability estimation and risk-sensitive navigation framework for bipedal robots operating in diverse, uneven environments. TravFormer, a transformer-based neural network, is trained to predict bipedal instability with uncertainty, enabling risk-aware and adaptive planning. Based on the network, we define traversability as stability-aware command velocity—the fastest command velocity that keeps instability below a user-defined limit. This velocity-based traversability is integrated into a hierarchical planner that combines traversability-informed Rapid Random Tree Star (TravRRT*) for time-efficient path planning and Model Predictive Control (MPC) for safe execution. We validate our method in MuJoCo simulator and the real world, demonstrating improved stability, time efficiency, and robustness across diverse terrains compared with existing methods. Project page with code: <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://state-nav.github.io/statenav/</uri>