Propagating Elevation-Map Uncertainty Through the Contact Maximum in Closed Form

Abstract

Risk-aware planners score paths on uncertain elevation maps using the path cost's mean and standard deviation. Modeling rigid contact, however, requires computing a maximum over several uncertain cells. First-order propagation loses accuracy here by differentiating at only a single cell, while Monte Carlo sampling requires a full path evaluation per draw. We compute the moments of that contact maximum in closed form using Clark's pairwise recursion. By tracking each contact's covariance against the shared map cells, we propagate the smooth remainder using exact Gaussian quadratic-form identities. A contest-depth calibration, fitted once on two design traverses, closes the aggregate standard-deviation shortfall that remains. On 317 held-out rover path segments, scored against a Monte Carlo reference from the same belief, every pre-registered criterion was met. The corrected Clark fold cuts the median error of the mean from linearization's 2.3% to 0.19% and attains the lowest error in the conditional value at risk (CVaR) at the 90% level of every method tested. A benchmark plan costs just 5.5 microseconds on a GPU. These accuracy gains concentrate at contested contacts. While they seldom change which path is chosen on this terrain, the fold still selects the reference-best path in 98% of decisions against linearization's 93 to 96%. On a second dataset the mean transfers, though the risk number does not.