No Arabic abstract
Motion planning with constraints is an important part of many real-world robotic systems. In this work, we study manifold learning methods to learn such constraints from data. We explore two methods for learning implicit constraint manifolds from data: Variational Autoencoders (VAE), and a new method, Equality Constraint Manifold Neural Network (ECoMaNN). With the aim of incorporating learned constraints into a sampling-based motion planning framework, we evaluate the approaches on their ability to learn representations of constraints from various datasets and on the quality of paths produced during planning.
Constrained robot motion planning is a widely used technique to solve complex robot tasks. We consider the problem of learning representations of constraints from demonstrations with a deep neural network, which we call Equality Constraint Manifold Neural Network (ECoMaNN). The key idea is to learn a level-set function of the constraint suitable for integration into a constrained sampling-based motion planner. Learning proceeds by aligning subspaces in the network with subspaces of the data. We combine both learned constraints and analytically described constraints into the planner and use a projection-based strategy to find valid points. We evaluate ECoMaNN on its representation capabilities of constraint manifolds, the impact of its individual loss terms, and the motions produced when incorporated into a planner.
We address the problem of planning robot motions in constrained configuration spaces where the constraints change throughout the motion. The problem is formulated as a fixed sequence of intersecting manifolds, which the robot needs to traverse in order to solve the task. We specify a class of sequential motion planning problems that fulfill a particular property of the change in the free configuration space when transitioning between manifolds. For this problem class, we develop the algorithm Planning on Sequenced Manifolds (PSM*) which searches for optimal intersection points between manifolds by using RRT* in an inner loop with a novel steering strategy. We provide a theoretical analysis regarding PSM*s probabilistic completeness and asymptotic optimality. Further, we evaluate its planning performance on multi-robot object transportation tasks. Video: https://youtu.be/Q8kbILTRxfU Code: https://github.com/etpr/sequential-manifold-planning
A defining feature of sampling-based motion planning is the reliance on an implicit representation of the state space, which is enabled by a set of probing samples. Traditionally, these samples are drawn either probabilistically or deterministically to uniformly cover the state space. Yet, the motion of many robotic systems is often restricted to small regions of the state space, due to, for example, differential constraints or collision-avoidance constraints. To accelerate the planning process, it is thus desirable to devise non-uniform sampling strategies that favor sampling in those regions where an optimal solution might lie. This paper proposes a methodology for non-uniform sampling, whereby a sampling distribution is learned from demonstrations, and then used to bias sampling. The sampling distribution is computed through a conditional variational autoencoder, allowing sample generation from the latent space conditioned on the specific planning problem. This methodology is general, can be used in combination with any sampling-based planner, and can effectively exploit the underlying structure of a planning problem while maintaining the theoretical guarantees of sampling-based approaches. Specifically, on several planning problems, the proposed methodology is shown to effectively learn representations for the relevant regions of the state space, resulting in an order of magnitude improvement in terms of success rate and convergence to the optimal cost.
Sampling-based motion planners have experienced much success due to their ability to efficiently and evenly explore the state space. However, for many tasks, it may be more efficient to not uniformly explore the state space, especially when there is prior information about its structure. Previous methods have attempted to modify the sampling distribution using hand selected heuristics that can work well for specific environments but not universally. In this paper, a policy- search based method is presented as an adaptive way to learn implicit sampling distributions for different environments. It utilizes information from past searches in similar environments to generate better distributions in novel environments, thus reducing overall computational cost. Our method can be incor- porated with a variety of sampling-based planners to improve performance. Our approach is validated on a number of tasks, including a 7DOF robot arm, showing marked improvement in number of collision checks as well as number of nodes expanded compared with baseline methods.
Motion planning and obstacle avoidance is a key challenge in robotics applications. While previous work succeeds to provide excellent solutions for known environments, sensor-based motion planning in new and dynamic environments remains difficult. In this work we address sensor-based motion planning from a learning perspective. Motivated by recent advances in visual recognition, we argue the importance of learning appropriate representations for motion planning. We propose a new obstacle representation based on the PointNet architecture and train it jointly with policies for obstacle avoidance. We experimentally evaluate our approach for rigid body motion planning in challenging environments and demonstrate significant improvements of the state of the art in terms of accuracy and efficiency.