No Arabic abstract
Motion planning is critical to realize the autonomous operation of mobile robots. As the complexity and stochasticity of robot application scenarios increase, the planning capability of the classical hierarchical motion planners is challenged. In recent years, with the development of intelligent computation technology, the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based motion planning algorithm has gradually become a research hotspot due to its advantageous features such as not relying on the map prior, model-free, and unified global and local planning paradigms. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of various motion planning methods. First, we summarize the representative and cutting-edge algorithms for each submodule of the classical motion planning architecture and analyze their performance limitations. Subsequently, we concentrate on reviewing RL-based motion planning approaches, including RL optimization motion planners, map-free end-to-end methods that integrate sensing and decision-making, and multi-robot cooperative planning methods. Last but not least, we analyze the urgent challenges faced by these mainstream RL-based motion planners in detail, review some state-of-the-art works for these issues, and propose suggestions for future research.
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.
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.
This paper describes Motion Planning Networks (MPNet), a computationally efficient, learning-based neural planner for solving motion planning problems. MPNet uses neural networks to learn general near-optimal heuristics for path planning in seen and unseen environments. It takes environment information such as raw point-cloud from depth sensors, as well as a robots initial and desired goal configurations and recursively calls itself to bidirectionally generate connectable paths. In addition to finding directly connectable and near-optimal paths in a single pass, we show that worst-case theoretical guarantees can be proven if we merge this neural network strategy with classical sample-based planners in a hybrid approach while still retaining significant computational and optimality improvements. To train the MPNet models, we present an active continual learning approach that enables MPNet to learn from streaming data and actively ask for expert demonstrations when needed, drastically reducing data for training. We validate MPNet against gold-standard and state-of-the-art planning methods in a variety of problems from 2D to 7D robot configuration spaces in challenging and cluttered environments, with results showing significant and consistently stronger performance metrics, and motivating neural planning in general as a modern strategy for solving motion planning problems efficiently.
Motion planning for multi-jointed robots is challenging. Due to the inherent complexity of the problem, most existing works decompose motion planning as easier subproblems. However, because of the inconsistent performance metrics, only sub-optimal solution can be found by decomposition based approaches. This paper presents an optimal control based approach to address the path planning and trajectory planning subproblems simultaneously. Unlike similar works which either ignore robot dynamics or require long computation time, an efficient numerical method for trajectory optimization is presented in this paper for motion planning involving complicated robot dynamics. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown by numerical results. Experimental results are used to show the feasibility of the presented planning algorithm.
Nonlinear programming targets nonlinear optimization with constraints, which is a generic yet complex methodology involving humans for problem modeling and algorithms for problem solving. We address the particularly hard challenge of supporting domain experts in handling, understanding, and trouble-shooting high-dimensional optimization with a large number of constraints. Leveraging visual analytics, users are supported in exploring the computation process of nonlinear constraint optimization. Our system was designed for robot motion planning problems and developed in tight collaboration with domain experts in nonlinear programming and robotics. We report on the experiences from this design study, illustrate the usefulness for relevant example cases, and discuss the extension to visual analytics for nonlinear programming in general.