DUnE: A Versatile Dynamic Unstructured Environment for Off-Road Navigation

Navigating uneven, unstructured terrain with dynamic obstacles remains a challenge for autonomous mobile robots. This article introduces Dynamic Unstructured Environment (DUnE) for evaluating the performance of off-road navigation systems in simulation. DUnE is a versatile software framework that implements the Gymnasium reinforcement learning (RL) interface for ROS 2, incorporating unstructured Gazebo simulation environments and dynamic obstacle integration to advance off-road navigation research. The testbed automates key performance metric logging and provides semi-automated trajectory generation for dynamic obstacles including simulated human actors. It supports multiple robot platforms and five distinct unstructured environments, ranging from forests to rocky terrains. A baseline reinforcement learning agent demonstrates the framework’s effectiveness by performing pointgoal navigation with obstacle avoidance across various terrains. By providing an RL interface, dynamic obstacle integration, specialized navigation tasks, and comprehensive metric tracking, DUnE addresses significant gaps in existing simulation tools.