No Arabic abstract
Traditional motion planning is computationally burdensome for practical robots, involving extensive collision checking and considerable iterative propagation of cost values. We present a novel neural network architecture which can directly generate the cost-to-go (c2g) function for a given configuration space and a goal configuration. The output of the network is a continuous function whose gradient in configuration space can be directly used to generate trajectories in motion planning without the need for protracted iterations or extensive collision checking. This higher order function (i.e. a function generating another function) representation lies at the core of our motion planning architecture, c2g-HOF, which can take a workspace as input, and generate the cost-to-go function over the configuration space map (C-map). Simulation results for 2D and 3D environments show that c2g-HOF can be orders of magnitude faster at execution time than methods which explore the configuration space during execution. We also present an implementation of c2g-HOF which generates trajectories for robot manipulators directly from an overhead image of the workspace.
This paper presents c2g-HOF networks which learn to generate cost-to-go functions for manipulator motion planning. The c2g-HOF architecture consists of a cost-to-go function over the configuration space represented as a neural network (c2g-network) as well as a Higher Order Function (HOF) network which outputs the weights of the c2g-network for a given input workspace. Both networks are trained end-to-end in a supervised fashion using costs computed from traditional motion planners. Once trained, c2g-HOF can generate a smooth and continuous cost-to-go function directly from workspace sensor inputs (represented as a point cloud in 3D or an image in 2D). At inference time, the weights of the c2g-network are computed very efficiently and near-optimal trajectories are generated by simply following the gradient of the cost-to-go function. We compare c2g-HOF with traditional planning algorithms for various robots and planning scenarios. The experimental results indicate that planning with c2g-HOF is significantly faster than other motion planning algorithms, resulting in orders of magnitude improvement when including collision checking. Furthermore, despite being trained from sparsely sampled trajectories in configuration space, c2g-HOF generalizes to generate smoother, and often lower cost, trajectories. We demonstrate cost-to-go based planning on a 7 DoF manipulator arm where motion planning in a complex workspace requires only 0.13 seconds for the entire trajectory.
This paper presents a supervised learning method to generate continuous cost-to-go functions of non-holonomic systems directly from the workspace description. Supervision from informative examples reduces training time and improves network performance. The manifold representing the optimal trajectories of a non-holonomic system has high-curvature regions which can not be efficiently captured with uniform sampling. To address this challenge, we present an adaptive sampling method which makes use of sampling-based planners along with local, closed-form solutions to generate training samples. The cost-to-go function over a specific workspace is represented as a neural network whose weights are generated by a second, higher order network. The networks are trained in an end-to-end fashion. In our previous work, this architecture was shown to successfully learn to generate the cost-to-go functions of holonomic systems using uniform sampling. In this work, we show that uniform sampling fails for non-holonomic systems. However, with the proposed adaptive sampling methodology, our network can generate near-optimal trajectories for non-holonomic systems while avoiding obstacles. Experiments show that our method is two orders of magnitude faster compared to traditional approaches in cluttered environments.
We focus on autonomously generating robot motion for day to day physical tasks that is expressive of a certain style or emotion. Because we seek generalization across task instances and task types, we propose to capture style via cost functions that the robot can use to augment its nominal task cost and task constraints in a trajectory optimization process. We compare two approaches to representing such cost functions: a weighted linear combination of hand-designed features, and a neural network parameterization operating on raw trajectory input. For each cost type, we learn weights for each style from user feedback. We contrast these approaches to a nominal motion across different tasks and for different styles in a user study, and find that they both perform on par with each other, and significantly outperform the baseline. Each approach has its advantages: featurized costs require learning fewer parameters and can perform better on some styles, but neural network representations do not require expert knowledge to design features and could even learn more complex, nuanced costs than an expert can easily design.
This paper introduces Chance Constrained Gaussian Process-Motion Planning (CCGP-MP), a motion planning algorithm for robotic systems under motion and state estimate uncertainties. The papers key idea is to capture the variations in the distance-to-collision measurements caused by the uncertainty in state estimation techniques using a Gaussian Process (GP) model. We formulate the planning problem as a chance constraint problem and propose a deterministic constraint that uses the modeled distance function to verify the chance-constraints. We apply Simplicial Homology Global Optimization (SHGO) approach to find the global minimum of the deterministic constraint function along the trajectory and use the minimum value to verify the chance-constraints. Under this formulation, we can show that the optimization function is smooth under certain conditions and that SHGO converges to the global minimum. Therefore, CCGP-MP will always guarantee that all points on a planned trajectory satisfy the given chance-constraints. The experiments in this paper show that CCGP-MP can generate paths that reduce collisions and meet optimality criteria under motion and state uncertainties. The implementation of our robot models and path planning algorithm can be found on GitHub.
Developing an intelligent vehicle which can perform human-like actions requires the ability to learn basic driving skills from a large amount of naturalistic driving data. The algorithms will become efficient if we could decompose the complex driving tasks into motion primitives which represent the elementary compositions of driving skills. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to segment unlabeled trajectory data into a library of motion primitives. By applying a probabilistic inference based on an iterative Expectation-Maximization algorithm, our method segments the collected trajectories while learning a set of motion primitives represented by the dynamic movement primitives. The proposed method utilizes the mutual dependencies between the segmentation and representation of motion primitives and the driving-specific based initial segmentation. By utilizing this mutual dependency and the initial condition, this paper presents how we can enhance the performance of both the segmentation and the motion primitive library establishment. We also evaluate the applicability of the primitive representation method to imitation learning and motion planning algorithms. The model is trained and validated by using the driving data collected from the Beijing Institute of Technology intelligent vehicle platform. The results show that the proposed approach can find the proper segmentation and establish the motion primitive library simultaneously.