No Arabic abstract
We propose a novel method for motion planning and illustrate its implementation on several canonical examples. The core novel idea underlying the method is to define a metric for which a path of minimal length is an admissible path, that is path that respects the various constraints imposed by the environment and the physics of the system on its dynamics. To be more precise, our method takes as input a control system with holonomic and non-holonomic constraints, an initial and final point in configuration space, a description of obstacles to avoid, and an initial trajectory for the system, called a sketch. This initial trajectory does not need to meet the constraints, except for the obstacle avoidance constraints. The constraints are then encoded in an inner product, which is used to deform (via a homotopy) the initial sketch into an admissible trajectory from which controls realizing the transfer can be obtained. We illustrate the method on various examples, including vehicle motion with obstacles and a two-link manipulator problem.
We propose in this paper a motion planning method for legged robot locomotion based on Geometric Heat Flow framework. The motion planning task is challenging due to the hybrid nature of dynamics and contact constraints. We encode the hybrid dynamics and constraints into Riemannian inner product, and this inner product is defined so that short curves correspond to admissible motions for the system. We rely on the affine geometric heat flow to deform an arbitrary path connecting the desired initial and final states to this admissible motion. The method is able to automatically find the trajectory of robots center of mass, feet contact positions and forces on uneven terrain.
This paper studies existing direct transcription methods for trajectory optimization applied to robot motion planning. There are diverse alternatives for the implementation of direct transcription. In this study we analyze the effects of such alternatives when solving a robotics problem. Different parameters such as integration scheme, number of discretization nodes, initialization strategies and complexity of the problem are evaluated. We measure the performance of the methods in terms of computational time, accuracy and quality of the solution. Additionally, we compare two optimization methodologies frequently used to solve the transcribed problem, namely Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) and Interior Point Method (IPM). As a benchmark, we solve different motion tasks on an underactuated and non-minimal-phase ball-balancing robot with a 10 dimensional state space and 3 dimensional input space. Additionally, we validate the results on a simulated 3D quadrotor. Finally, as a verification of using direct transcription methods for trajectory optimization on real robots, we present hardware experiments on a motion task including path constraints and actuation limits.
With the development of robotics, there are growing needs for real time motion planning. However, due to obstacles in the environment, the planning problem is highly non-convex, which makes it difficult to achieve real time computation using existing non-convex optimization algorithms. This paper introduces the convex feasible set algorithm (CFS) which is a fast algorithm for non-convex optimization problems that have convex costs and non-convex constraints. The idea is to find a convex feasible set for the original problem and iteratively solve a sequence of subproblems using the convex constraints. The feasibility and the convergence of the proposed algorithm are proved in the paper. The application of this method on motion planning for mobile robots is discussed. The simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
To move through the world, mobile robots typically use a receding-horizon strategy, wherein they execute an old plan while computing a new plan to incorporate new sensor information. A plan should be dynamically feasible, meaning it obeys constraints like the robots dynamics and obstacle avoidance; it should have liveness, meaning the robot does not stop to plan so frequently that it cannot accomplish tasks; and it should be optimal, meaning that the robot tries to satisfy a user-specified cost function such as reaching a goal location as quickly as possible. Reachability-based Trajectory Design (RTD) is a planning method that can generate provably dynamically-feasible plans. However, RTD solves a nonlinear polynmial optimization program at each planning iteration, preventing optimality guarantees; furthermore, RTD can struggle with liveness because the robot must brake to a stop when the solver finds local minima or cannot find a feasible solution. This paper proposes RTD*, which certifiably finds the globally optimal plan (if such a plan exists) at each planning iteration. This method is enabled by a novel Parallelized Constrained Bernstein Algorithm (PCBA), which is a branch-and-bound method for polynomial optimization. The contributions of this paper are: the implementation of PCBA; proofs of bounds on the time and memory usage of PCBA; a comparison of PCBA to state of the art solvers; and the demonstration of PCBA/RTD* on a mobile robot. RTD* outperforms RTD in terms of optimality and liveness for real-time planning in a variety of environments with randomly-placed obstacles.
Various applications of advanced air mobility (AAM) in urban environments facilitate our daily life and public services. As one of the key issues of realizing these applications autonomously, path planning problem has been studied with main objectives on minimizing travel distance, flight time and energy cost. However, AAM operations in metropolitan areas bring safety and society issues. Because most of AAM aircraft are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and they may fail to operate resulting in fatality risk, property damage risk and societal impacts (noise and privacy) to the public. To quantitatively assess these risks and mitigate them in planning phase, this paper proposes an integrated risk assessment model and develops a hybrid algorithm to solve the risk-based 3D path planning problem. The integrated risk assessment method considers probability and severity models of UAV impact ground people and vehicle. By introducing gravity model, the population density and traffic density are estimated in a finer scale, which enables more accurate risk assessment. The 3D risk-based path planning problem is first formulated as a special minimum cost flow problem. Then, a hybrid estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) and risk-based A* (named as EDA-RA*) algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. To improve computational efficiency, k-means clustering method is incorporated into EDA-RA* to provide both global and local search heuristic information, which formed the EDA and fast risk-based A* algorithm we call EDA-FRA*. Case study results show that the risk assessment model can capture high risk areas and the generated risk map enables safe UAV path planning in urban complex environments.