Paper Detail

Continual Learning for Traversability Prediction with Uncertainty-Aware Adaptation

Hojin Lee, Yunho Lee, Daniel A Duecker, Cheolhyeon Kwon

arxiv Score 15.5

Published 2026-09-15 · First seen 2026-09-17

Research Track A

Abstract

Traversability prediction is a critical component of autonomous navigation in unstructured environments, where complex and uncertain robot-terrain interactions pose significant challenges such as traction loss and dynamic instability. Despite recent progress in learning-based traversability prediction, these methods often fail to adapt to novel terrains. Even when adaptation is achieved, retaining experience from previously trained environments remains a challenge, a problem known as catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose a continual learning framework for traversability prediction that incrementally adapts to new terrains using a generative experience recall model. A key virtue of the proposed framework is two folds: i) retain prior experience without storing past data; and ii) incorporate the uncertainty of the generated samples from the recall model, enabling uncertainty-aware adaptation. Real-world experiments with a skid-steering robot validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, demonstrating its ability to adapt across a series of diverse environments while mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
now
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{lee2026continual,
  title = {Continual Learning for Traversability Prediction with Uncertainty-Aware Adaptation},
  author = {Hojin Lee and Yunho Lee and Daniel A Duecker and Cheolhyeon Kwon},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Traversability prediction is a critical component of autonomous navigation in unstructured environments, where complex and uncertain robot-terrain interactions pose significant challenges such as traction loss and dynamic instability. Despite recent progress in learning-based traversability prediction, these methods often fail to adapt to novel terrains. Even when adaptation is achieved, retaining experience from previously trained environments remains a challenge, a problem known as catastrophi},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17141},
  keywords = {cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG},
  eprint = {2609.17141},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}