Traversing terrain with good traction is crucial for achieving fast off-road
navigation. Instead of manually designing costs based on terrain features,
existing methods learn terrain properties directly from data via
self-supervision, but challenges remain to properly quantify and mitigate risks
due to uncertainties in learned models. This work efficiently quantifies both
aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties by learning discrete traction
distributions and probability densities of the traction predictor's latent
features. Leveraging evidential deep learning, we parameterize Dirichlet
distributions with the network outputs and propose a novel uncertainty-aware
squared Earth Mover's distance loss with a closed-form expression that improves
learning accuracy and navigation performance. The proposed risk-aware planner
simulates state trajectories with the worst-case expected traction to handle
aleatoric uncertainty, and penalizes trajectories moving through terrain with
high epistemic uncertainty. Our approach is extensively validated in simulation
and on wheeled and quadruped robots, showing improved navigation performance
compared to methods that assume no slip, assume the expected traction, or
optimize for the worst-case expected cost.

通过学习地形性质直接获取数据，本研究以有效地量化离散牵引分布和牵引预测潜在特征的概率密度，利用证据深度学习参数化与网络输出的狄利克雷分布，并提出了一种新颖的风险感知和平方地球移动距离损失，通过模拟最坏情况下的牵引来处理不确定性，惩罚通过具有高认知不确定性的地形的轨迹，并在仿真中广泛验证以及在轮式机器人和四足机器人上进行比较，显示出改进的导航性能。