Off-road/Racing Working Group Meeting 2025/04/24

[pojenwang]

Administrative

Previous Meeting Minutes

Attendees

• Po-Jen Wang (AWF)
• Christian John (Tier4)
• David Walmroth (Open AD Kit / Pix-Moving)
• Jack Silberman (UCSD)
• Tran

Minutes: Po-Jen Wang

Off-road ODD

• Space vehicles:
  • Eg. Mars rovers, lunar terrain vehicles
  • BEV perception
    • object detection, depth estimation, and segmentation are done in BEV space (early fusion)
    • model: BEV fusion, BEV depth
    • data: synthetic data
    • Potential limitation from lack of features in BEV space since Mars/Lunar terrain is generally more open. On the other side, Mars/Lunar terrain is also simpler compared to the urban environment on Earth
• Earth vehicles:
  • Eg. buggy, mining, agricultural vehicles
  • image-based terrestrial perception + Lidar
    • object detection, depth estimation, segmentation done in image space before projecting and merging in BEV space (late fusion)
    • model: re-purpose SceneSeg, Scene3D from the privately owned vehicle wg, trained with off-road dataset
    • data: real-world data

Yearly plan

• P1:
  • Simulator evaluation for off-road
  • Experiment and deployment of BEV fusion model
  • dataset curation for image-based terrestrial perception
• P2:
  • Implementation of Mars/Lunar simulation for environment/rover to create ground truth data for BEV Fusion model.
  • Training of terrestrial perception model for navigability/obstacles (image space with real-world data).
• P3:
  • Completion of simulation and training BEV Fusion model for Mars environment.
  • Dataset curation for off-road depth/3D fusion model (terrestrial).
• P4:
  • First implementation of Mars navigation autonomy stack.
  • Completion of terrestrial perception stack - obstacles and depth.
• Upcoming tasks (May)
  • Complete configurable off-road racetrack environment
  • Simulator evaluation of BeamNG, Chrono, Carla
  • Dataset curation for image-based terrestrial perception

Racing

• Autoware will be participating in the Roboracer sim challenge at ICRA 2025
• May 3rd, 4th: Qualification Round
• May 10, 11: Final Race
• Using AutoDRIVE Ecosystem (Sim and Devkit) developed by the Tinker Twins at Clemson University (CoE member)

Other topics:

• AWF Work Group overview: https://autoware.org/join-a-work-group/