Proprioceptive Safe Active Navigation and Exploration for Planetary Environments

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08905v1
• Date: Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:17:50 GMT
• Title: Proprioceptive Safe Active Navigation and Exploration for Planetary Environments
• Abstract summary: Proprioceptive Safe Active Navigation and Exploration (PSANE) is a framework for safe navigation and exploration in unknown deformable environments.<n>PSANE learns a traversability model via Gaussian Process regression to estimate and certify safe regions.<n>It integrates these estimates with a reactive controller for real-time navigation.
• Score: 2.2120851074630177
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Deformable granular terrains introduce significant locomotion and immobilization risks in planetary exploration and are difficult to detect via remote sensing (e.g., vision). Legged robots can sense terrain properties through leg-terrain interactions during locomotion, offering a direct means to assess traversability in deformable environments. How to systematically exploit this interaction-derived information for navigation planning, however, remains underexplored. We address this gap by presenting PSANE, a Proprioceptive Safe Active Navigation and Exploration framework that leverages leg-terrain interaction measurements for safe navigation and exploration in unknown deformable environments. PSANE learns a traversability model via Gaussian Process regression to estimate and certify safe regions and identify exploration frontiers online, and integrates these estimates with a reactive controller for real-time navigation. Frontier selection is formulated as a multi-objective optimization that balances safe-set expansion probability and goal-directed cost, with subgoals selected via scalarization over the Pareto-optimal frontier set. PSANE safely explores unknown granular terrain and reaches specified goals using only proprioceptively estimated traversability, while achieving performance improvements over baseline methods.

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