No Arabic abstract
Multi-axis additive manufacturing enables high flexibility of material deposition along dynamically varied directions. The Cartesian motion platforms of these machines include three parallel axes and two rotational axes. Singularity on rotational axes is a critical issue to be tackled in motion planning for ensuring high quality of manufacturing results. The highly nonlinear mapping in the singular region can convert a smooth toolpath with uniformly sampled waypoints defined in the model coordinate system into a highly discontinuous motion in the machine coordinate system, which leads to over-extrusion / under-extrusion of materials in filament-based additive manufacturing. The problem is challenging as both the maximal and the minimal speeds at the tip of a printer head must be controlled in motion. Moreover, collision may occur when sampling-based collision avoidance is employed. In this paper, we present a motion planning method to support the manufacturing realization of designed toolpaths for multi-axis additive manufacturing. Problems of singularity and collision are considered in an integrated manner to improve the motion therefore the quality of fabrication.
We present an integrated Task-Motion Planning (TMP) framework for navigation in large-scale environments. Of late, TMP for manipulation has attracted significant interest resulting in a proliferation of different approaches. In contrast, TMP for navigation has received considerably less attention. Autonomous robots operating in real-world complex scenarios require planning in the discrete (task) space and the continuous (motion) space. In knowledge-intensive domains, on the one hand, a robot has to reason at the highest-level, for example, the objects to procure, the regions to navigate to in order to acquire them; on the other hand, the feasibility of the respective navigation tasks have to be checked at the execution level. This presents a need for motion-planning-aware task planners. In this paper, we discuss a probabilistically complete approach that leverages this task-motion interaction for navigating in large knowledge-intensive domains, returning a plan that is optimal at the task-level. The framework is intended for motion planning under motion and sensing uncertainty, which is formally known as belief space planning. The underlying methodology is validated in simulation, in an office environment and its scalability is tested in the larger Willow Garage world. A reasonable comparison with a work that is closest to our approach is also provided. We also demonstrate the adaptability of our approach by considering a building floor navigation domain. Finally, we also discuss the limitations of our approach and put forward suggestions for improvements and future work.
For autonomous vehicles integrating onto roadways with human traffic participants, it requires understanding and adapting to the participants intention and driving styles by responding in predictable ways without explicit communication. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning based negotiation-aware motion planning framework, which adopts RL to adjust the driving style of the planner by dynamically modifying the prediction horizon length of the motion planner in real time adaptively w.r.t the event of a change in environment, typically triggered by traffic participants switch of intents with different driving styles. The framework models the interaction between the autonomous vehicle and other traffic participants as a Markov Decision Process. A temporal sequence of occupancy grid maps are taken as inputs for RL module to embed an implicit intention reasoning. Curriculum learning is employed to enhance the training efficiency and the robustness of the algorithm. We applied our method to narrow lane navigation in both simulation and real world to demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the common alternative due to its advantage in alleviating the social dilemma problem with proper negotiation skills.
We present a novel method for handling uncertainty about the intentions of non-ego players in dynamic games, with application to motion planning for autonomous vehicles. Equilibria in these games explicitly account for interaction among other agents in the environment, such as drivers and pedestrians. Our method models the uncertainty about the intention of other agents by constructing multiple hypotheses about the objectives and constraints of other agents in the scene. For each candidate hypothesis, we associate a Bernoulli random variable representing the probability of that hypothesis, which may or may not be independent of the probability of other hypotheses. We leverage constraint asymmetries and feedback information patterns to incorporate the probabilities of hypotheses in a natural way. Specifically, increasing the probability associated with a given hypothesis from $0$ to $1$ shifts the responsibility of collision avoidance from the hypothesized agent to the ego agent. This method allows the generation of interactive trajectories for the ego agent, where the level of assertiveness or caution that the ego exhibits is directly related to the easy-to-model uncertainty it maintains about the scene.
The ability to develop a high-level understanding of a scene, such as perceiving danger levels, can prove valuable in planning multi-robot search and rescue (SaR) missions. In this work, we propose to uniquely leverage natural language descriptions from the mission commander in chief and image data captured by robots to estimate scene danger. Given a description and an image, a state-of-the-art deep neural network is used to assess a corresponding similarity score, which is then converted into a probabilistic distribution of danger levels. Because commonly used visio-linguistic datasets do not represent SaR missions well, we collect a large-scale image-description dataset from synthetic images taken from realistic disaster scenes and use it to train our machine learning model. A risk-aware variant of the Multi-robot Efficient Search Path Planning (MESPP) problem is then formulated to use the danger estimates in order to account for high-risk locations in the environment when planning the searchers paths. The problem is solved via a distributed approach based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming. Our experiments demonstrate that our framework allows to plan safer yet highly successful search missions, abiding to the two most important aspects of SaR missions: to ensure both searchers and victim safety.
In this extended abstract, we report on ongoing work towards an approximate multimodal optimization algorithm with asymptotic guarantees. Multimodal optimization is the problem of finding all local optimal solutions (modes) to a path optimization problem. This is important to compress path databases, as contingencies for replanning and as source of symbolic representations. Following ideas from Morse theory, we define modes as paths invariant under optimization of a cost functional. We develop a multi-mode estimation algorithm which approximately finds all modes of a given motion optimization problem and asymptotically converges. This is made possible by integrating sparse roadmaps with an existing single-mode optimization algorithm. Initial evaluation results show the multi-mode estimation algorithm as a promising direction to study path spaces from a topological point of view.