A Simulated Environment for Traversability Estimation Experiments in Field Robotics Applications

Abstract

We present an environment for simulated experiments in field robotics, and especially in experiments on estimating the traversability of foliage and other objects that appear as obstacles but that can be overcome by the robot without circumventing them. The simulated environment is developed in the Unity real-time development platform, integrated with the ROS middleware. In the preliminary experiments presented here, we demonstrate that our environment is able to simulate the sensory input needed in order to train supervised traversability estimation models.