arXiv:2611.15280 · v1
Autonomous Trail Racing with a Bicycle Robot
摘要
Navigating off-road trails on a mountain bike requires diverse locomotion skills, including aerial maneuvers, cornering, and slip recovery, paired with sophisticated perception for scene understanding. Translating these capabilities to autonomous, two-wheeled robots remains a formidable challenge. We show that autonomous, high-speed trail navigation can be achieved through a single idea: encoding the trail as a semantic layer of the terrain. In simulation, this layer embeds the navigation task into the training environment; during deployment, it is reconstructed onboard from camera and LiDAR data. First, we introduce a unified learning framework that treats local navigation and locomotion as a joint optimization problem, bypassing the twist or pose command interface of classical control hierarchies. With fixed reward weights, the same framework produces both trail racing and agile parkour, shaped only through terrain semantics and episode length. Second, our perception pipeline combines a frozen vision foundation model with a lightweight dual-head decoder that predicts per-pixel terrain semantics and confidence scores, which are fused with LiDAR range measurements into an egocentric semantic elevation map at 30 Hz onboard an NVIDIA AGX Orin. We validate our framework on the Ultra Mobility Vehicle (UMV), a bicycle robot that autonomously raced across all sections of a kilometer-long, unstructured mountain bike trail at speeds exceeding 5 m/s and averaging 3.26 m/s. In simulation, our policy fails up to an order of magnitude less often than hierarchical baselines while driving faster.
作者备注：35 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables (incl. appendix with supplementary figures and tables). Submitted to The International Journal of Robotics Research. Project page: https://pages.rai-inst.com/autonomous-trail-racing/. Code: https://github.com/rai-opensource/sem_map