IJCAS

With the increasing demand for mobile robots and autonomous vehicles, several approaches for long-term robot navigation have been proposed. Among these techniques, ground segmentation and traversability estimation play important roles in perception and path planning, respectively. Even though these two techniques appear similar, their objectives are different. Ground segmentation divides data into ground and non-ground elements; thus, it is used
as a preprocessing stage to extract objects of interest by rejecting ground points. In contrast, traversability estimation identifies and comprehends areas in which robots can move safely. Nevertheless, some researchers use these terms
without clear distinction, leading to misunderstanding the two concepts. Therefore, in this study, we survey related literature and clearly distinguish ground and traversable regions considering four aspects: a) maneuverability of robot
platforms, b) position of a robot in the surroundings, c) subset relation of negative obstacles, and d) subset relation of deformable objects.

Keywords: Ground segmentation, robotics, terrain classification, traversability estimation.