An Autonomous Traversable Area Mapping System for UGVs in Off-Road Environments

Constructing traversable maps in off-road environments is of great significance for the deployment of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in applications such as disaster rescue and agricultural production. However, existing approaches often rely on manually scanning the environment to generate maps, followed by labor-intensive labeling of traversable regions, which is both time-consuming and inefficient. To address this issue, this paper proposes an autonomous exploration-based UGV system capable of automatically building traversable maps. The system integrates a traversability discrimination method with an autonomous exploration strategy, enabling the vehicle to complete the mapping task independently in unknown environments. The proposed framework is implemented on a real UGV platform, and field experiments are conducted. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the generated traversable maps are provided, demonstrating the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach.