AnyTraverse

An Offroad Traversability Framework with VLM and Human Operator in the Loop.

News 📰

• Jul, 2025: AnyTraverse presented at the 19th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Set to be published in proceedings (Springer Nature, "Experimental Robotics").

Installation

1. Install PyTorch: AnyTraverse requires torch and torchvision to be installed. Install compatible torch and torchvision versions for your platform before proceeding.

   uv add torch torchvision       # uv users
   pip install torch torchvision  # pip users

   ⚠️ PyTorch does not provide wheels for the NVIDIA Jetson platform. Please ensure you have installed te compatible versions of torch, torchvision for your Jetson device for GPU acceleration.

2. Install AnyTraverse: Install anytraverse using your python dependency manager. We recommend using uv

   uv add anytraverse       # uv users
   pip install anytraverse  # pip users

Optional

• AnyTraverse allows you to bring your own vision-language models (VLMs) and image embedding models and use them by creating wrappers. However, it also ships with some wrappers for models on HuggingFace.
• To use these models, install the transformers package with additional dependencies.

  uv add transformers einops acccelerate      # uv users
  pip install transformers einops accelerate  # pip users

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Usage

Quickstart 🏃‍♂️

This example explains how to get started with the implementation discussed in the original paper. To get the implementation from the paper running, use the function provided.

from anytraverse import build_pipeline_from_paper
from PIL import Image as PILImage
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import patches
import requests


def main():
    # Load the image
    url = "https://source.roboflow.com/oWTBJ1yeWRbHDXbzJBrOsPVaoH92/0C8goYvWpiqF26dNKxby/original.jpg"
    image = PILImage.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw)

    # Build the pipeline from the paper
    anytraverse = build_pipeline_from_paper(
        init_traversabilty_preferences={"road": 1, "bush": -0.8, "rock": 0.45},
        ref_scene_similarity_threshold=0.8,
        roi_uncertainty_threshold=0.3,
        roi_x_bounds=(0.333, 0.667),
        roi_y_bounds=(0.6, 0.95),
    )

    # Take one step
    state = anytraverse.step(image=image)

    # Plot the attention maps
    fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 3, figsize=(15, 5))
    for attn_map, prompt, ax_ in zip(
        state.attention_maps, state.traversability_preferences, ax
    ):
        ax_.imshow(image)
        ax_.imshow(attn_map.cpu(), cmap="plasma", alpha=0.4)
        ax_.set_title(prompt)
        ax_.axis("off")
    plt.show()

    # See the traversability and uncertainty maps
    fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(16, 9))
    (x0, y0), (x1, y1) = state.roi_bbox
    rects = [
        patches.Rectangle(
            (x0, y0),
            x1 - x0,
            y1 - y0,
            edgecolor="#ffffff",
            facecolor="#ffffff22",
            linewidth=4,
        )
        for _ in range(2)
    ]
    for ax_, m, r_roi, title, rect in zip(
        ax,
        (state.traversability_map, state.uncertainty_map),
        (state.traversability_map_roi.mean(), state.uncertainty_map_roi.mean()),
        ("Traversability Map", "Uncertainty Map"),
        rects,
    ):
        ax_.imshow(image)
        map_plot = ax_.imshow(m.cpu(), alpha=0.5, cmap="plasma")
        ax_.add_patch(rect)
        ax_.text(
            x0,
            y0 - 15,
            f"ROI {title.split(' ')[0]}: {r_roi * 100.0:.2f}%",
            size=18,
            color="#ffffff",
        )
        ax_.axis("off")
        ax_.set_title(title, fontsize=22)
        cbar = plt.colorbar(map_plot, orientation="horizontal", pad=0.01)
        cbar.set_label(f"{title.split(' ')[0]} Score", fontsize=12)
        for t in cbar.ax.get_xticklabels():
            t.set_fontsize(10)
    fig.tight_layout()
    plt.show()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Attention Maps

Traversability and uncertainty maps

Make AnyTraverse your Own! 🤓

• AnyTraverse is modular and the modules from the original paper can be swapped with your own implementation easily.
• The VLM, image encoder, traversability pooling and uncertainty pooling modules can be replaced with your own implementation, by extending abstract base classes provided in the anytraverse package.
• Refer to the extended documentation to learn more.

NOTE: You may refer to the DeepWiki documentation to fully understand the repository, until the extended documentation is ready.

Launch AnyTraverse into Action with ROS2 🤖

AnyTraverse is fully integrated with the Nav2 navigation stack in ROS2. See sattwik-sahu/anytraverse_ros to learn more.

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Contributing 👨‍💻

We'd love to see your implementations and modifications to help make AnyTraverse better. Please create a pull request (branch name: dev/feat/<your-feature-name>) to add a new feature and raise and issue to request a new feature.

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Made with ❤️ in IISER Bhopal.