Research/ TESTBEDS & SIMULATION
Verti-Arena: A Controllable and Standardized Indoor Testbed for Multi-Terrain Off-Road Autonomy
Haiyue Chen, Aniket Datar, Tong Xu, Francesco Cancelliere, Harsh Rangwala, Madhan Balaji Rao, Daeun Song, David Eichinger, and Xuesu Xiao
Simulation, Digital Twins & BenchmarksOpenAlex keyword: indoor testbed · Surface Mobility & TerramechanicsOpenAlex topic: Control and Dynamics of Mobile Robots · Perception & State EstimationOpenAlex topic: Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
arXivcs.ROOpenAlexRobotics and Sensor-Based Localization · Control and Dynamics of Mobile Robots · Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
Off-road navigation is an important capability for mobile robots deployed in environments that are inaccessible or dangerous to humans, such as disaster response or planetary exploration. Progress is limited due to the lack of a controllable and standardized real-world testbed for systematic data collection and validation. To fill this gap, we introduce Verti-Arena, a reconfigurable indoor facility designed specifically for off-road autonomy. By providing a repeatable benchmark environment, Verti-Arena supports reproducible experiments across a variety of vertically challenging terrains and provides precise ground truth measurements through onboard sensors and a motion capture system. Verti-Arena also supports consistent data collection and comparative evaluation of algorithms in off-road autonomy research. We also develop a web-based interface that enables research groups worldwide to remotely conduct standardized off-road autonomy experiments on Verti-Arena.
Comments: 6 pages, accepted by the 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics