Learning When to Jump for Off-road Navigation

Zhipeng Zhao  |  Taimeng Fu  |  Shaoshu Su  |  Qiwei Du
Ehsan Tarkesh Esfahani  |  Karthik Dantu  |  Souma Chowdhury  |  Chen Wang

Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2026

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🚀 Features

A Complete Off-Road Autonomous Navigation System

✅ Off-Road Navigation: Complete ROS-based system for perception, planning, and control in off-road.
✅ Motion-aware Traversability (MAT): The map proposed in this paper, where each location's traversability is modeled as a function of vehicle speed.
✅ CUDA-based MPPI: Real-time trajectory optimization node built with MPPI-Generic.
✅ BeamNG Integration: Realistic soft-body vehicle dynamics and off-road terrain interaction.

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🏗 System Components

BeamNG Simulation

Component	Description
Sensors Interface	Scenario loading, sensor data streaming from BeamNG.
Agent Control Interface	Controlling a specific vehicle in BeamNG via AI/commands.

Navigation Modules

Component	Description
Terrain Mapping	lidar scan → local point clouds.
Traversability Analysis	local point clouds → traversability map.
Global Waypoints	A mission-level publisher → goal points.
MPPI Planner	goal point → local path (path optimization).
PID Controller	local path → commands (throttle/brake, steering).

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🛠 Quick Start

1. Prerequisites

Build & Source your ROS environment:

catkin_make
source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

2. Configuration

Check the config files under example/config/:

• simulation.config: Set your BeamNG Port & Host, Scenario
• navigation_sim.config: Enable/disable Navigation Modules & set file paths.

3. Launching

Single-entry Execution: Launch all modules in one terminal & RViz for interactive navigation.

# Ensure the script is executable
chmod +x ./example/nav_start.sh

# Run the system
./example/nav_start.sh 

Start your off-road autonomous navigation in one of two Modes:
1. Click a goal in RViz (default).
2. Follow waypoints from `NAV_WAYPOINT_FILE` by setting `ENABLE_GLOBAL_WAYPOINTS=true` in `navigation_sim.config`.

Or, you can refer to example/launch_commands.md for direct roslaunch commands to start any individual module you want.

📚 Citation

@inproceedings{zhao2026learning,
  title = {Learning When to Jump for Off-road Navigation},
  author = {Zhao, Zhipeng and Fu, Taimeng and Su, Shaoshu and Du, Qiwei and Esfahani, Ehsan Tarkesh and Dantu, Karthik and Chowdhury, Souma and Wang, Chen},
  booktitle = {Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00877}
}

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the following repositories that parts of our codebase were adapted from or built upon:

• ACDSLab/MPPI-Generic

• BeamNG/beamng-ros-integration

• jizhang-cmu/ground_based_autonomy_basic