Satellite–UAV Collaborative Off-Road Traversability Mapping and Incremental Updating for Unmanned Ground Vehicles
Abstract
Large-area remote-sensing data provide essential pre-mission information for unmanned ground vehicles, but their spatial support and temporal latency may obscure local terrain changes. A remaining challenge is to translate heterogeneous regional evidence and recent local observations into a consistent, updateable, and planner-ready map. This study presents a satellite–unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) workflow for constructing and incrementally maintaining an off-road traversability map for mission-level global planning. A common H3 index organizes satellite imagery, terrain, soil, road evidence, and local UAV semantic observations while retaining their native spatial support and provenance. The map separates environmental-prior, semantic, and traversability-cost layers to support interpretable fusion and independent updating. A confidence-hierarchical conflict resolution mechanism resolves inconsistencies in the regional prior, while an observer-agnostic interface projects UAV semantic observations onto local map cells. RGB imagery is used by the primary UAV observer, and digital surface model (DSM) is evaluated as an optional semantic-observation modality. Evaluation included a manually reviewed regional benchmark, a unified buffered spatial holdout, cell-level update assessment, and 40 fixed replanning tasks. Conflict resolution reduced high-risk omissions. RGB-only SegFormer-B2 achieved the highest semantic accuracy with moderate computational complexity. UAV override achieved a cell-level F1 score of 96.96% and limited the false-positive accumulation associated with conservative union. Replanning further revealed a trade-off between hazardous-cell avoidance and search-graph connectivity. The proposed workflow provides a maintainable interface between multi-source remote sensing and global UGV planning rather than a replacement for onboard perception, local obstacle avoidance, or vehicle control.