An Open-Source LiDAR and Monocular Off-Road Autonomous Navigation Stack

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source off-road navigation system that effectively combines LiDAR and monocular depth estimation, demonstrating comparable performance in unstructured terrains and providing a reproducible benchmark.

Contribution

It presents a novel integration of foundation-model-based monocular depth estimation with SLAM for off-road navigation, without requiring task-specific training.

Findings

Monocular depth estimation matches LiDAR performance in many scenarios.

Edge-masking and temporal smoothing improve robustness against obstacles.

The open-source stack and simulation environment facilitate reproducible research.

Abstract

Off-road autonomous navigation demands reliable 3D perception for robust obstacle detection in challenging unstructured terrain. While LiDAR is accurate, it is costly and power-intensive. Monocular depth estimation using foundation models offers a lightweight alternative, but its integration into outdoor navigation stacks remains underexplored. We present an open-source off-road navigation stack supporting both LiDAR and monocular 3D perception without task-specific training. For the monocular setup, we combine zero-shot depth prediction (Depth Anything V2) with metric depth rescaling using sparse SLAM measurements (VINS-Mono). Two key enhancements improve robustness: edge-masking to reduce obstacle hallucination and temporal smoothing to mitigate the impact of SLAM instability. The resulting point cloud is used to generate a robot-centric 2.5D elevation map for costmap-based planning. Evaluated in photorealistic simulations (Isaac Sim) and real-world unstructured environments, the monocular configuration matches high-resolution LiDAR performance in most scenarios, demonstrating that foundation-model-based monocular depth estimation is a viable LiDAR alternative for robust off-road navigation. By open-sourcing the navigation stack and the simulation environment, we provide a complete pipeline for off-road navigation as well as a reproducible benchmark. Code available at https://github.com/LARIAD/Offroad-Nav.