General Information

The field of autonomous off-road driving has been a field of great interest due to applications in various industries, such as agriculture, search and rescue, and military operations. The dynamic and unpredictable nature of off-road environments poses unique challenges and opens avenues for all aspects of robotic research. The goal of this workshop is to engage experts and researchers in off-road driving, in a broad coverage of public datasets, benchmarks, software stacks, infrastructures, state estimation, semantic segmentation, traversability estimation, terrain analysis, planning, dynamics model, domain adaptation, and more.

This will be a full-day workshop. It will feature a mix of presentations, open panel discussions, and an invited poster session. There will be eight invited speakers and a keynote speaker to discuss their related research, thoughts, and experiences in various directions of off-road autonomous driving. The workshop aims to foster discussion, share insights, and encourage collaborations among experts from academia, industry, and research institutions, as well as to identify the key challenges and opportunities in the advancement of autonomous off-road driving technologies.

Sessions Overview

	Presenter	Session Title	Time
Welcome message by organizers & overview of workshop			8:45 - 9:00 AM
	Marco Hutter Professor of Robotics ETH Zurich	Rough terrain locomotion	9:00 - 9:30 AM
	Xuesu Xiao Assistant Professor George Mason University	Learning Extreme Off-Road Mobility	9:30 - 10:00 AM
	Poster Lightning Session	All poster presenters give a 1 min talk to present their work	10:00 - 10:20 AM
	Poster session	Attendees can walk around to view presenters’ posters	10:20 - 11:00 AM
	Byron Boots Professor of Machine Learning University of Washington	Visual Modeling of Complex Terrain for High-speed, Off-road Navigation	11:00 - 11:30 AM
	Sebastian Scherer Associate Research Professor, Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University	Self-supervised Costmap Learning for Off-road Vehicle Traversability	11:30 - 12:00 PM
	Ali Agha Principal Investigator and Research Technologist JPL and CAST of Caltech	Resilient Robotic Autonomy Under Uncertainty	1:00 - 1:30 PM
	Maggie Wigness Senior Computer Scientist U.S. Army Research Laboratory	Human-Centered Machine Learning for Autonomous Navigation	1:30 - 2:00 PM
	Poster Lightning Session	All poster presenters give a 1 min talk to present their work	2:00 - 2:15 PM
	Poster session	Attendees can walk around to view presenters’ posters	2:15 - 2:45 PM
	Amy Tabb Research PI USDA	Calibration of Multiple-Camera Imaging Systems	2:45 - 3:15 PM
	Inwook Shim Senior researcher Agency for Defense Development (ADD), Korea	Learning Off-Road Terrain Traversability	3:15 - 3:45 PM
	Paulo Borges Principal Research Scientist CSIRO	Title TBD	3:45 - 4:15 PM
	Panel	Panel Discussion	4:15 - 4:45 PM
	Closing remarks	Workshop ends	4:45 - 5:00 PM

Call for Posters

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following (all under the context of their roles in off-road autonomy):

Multi-modal perception
Self-supervised learning
Sim-to-real transfer
Online adaptation
Traversability estimation
Foundation models for navigation
Heterogeneous collaborative robots
Off-road driving dataset
Safe robot operation in uncertain and dynamic environments
Planning without prior knowledge of an environment
Approaches to off-road driving that work on multiple types of robots
Long-term localization and mapping in complex environments
Representations of terrain that model physical properties and robot-environment interaction