No Arabic abstract
Reliable real-time planning for robots is essential in todays rapidly expanding automated ecosystem. In such environments, traditional methods that plan by relaxing constraints become unreliable or slow-down for kinematically constrained robots. This paper describes the algorithm Dynamic Motion Planning Networks (Dynamic MPNet), an extension to Motion Planning Networks, for non-holonomic robots that address the challenge of real-time motion planning using a neural planning approach. We propose modifications to the training and planning networks that make it possible for real-time planning while improving the data efficiency of training and trained models generalizability. We evaluate our model in simulation for planning tasks for a non-holonomic robot. We also demonstrate experimental results for an indoor navigation task using a Dubins car.
Motion planning under uncertainty is of significant importance for safety-critical systems such as autonomous vehicles. Such systems have to satisfy necessary constraints (e.g., collision avoidance) with potential uncertainties coming from either disturbed system dynamics or noisy sensor measurements. However, existing motion planning methods cannot efficiently find the robust optimal solutions under general nonlinear and non-convex settings. In this paper, we formulate such problem as chance-constrained Gaussian belief space planning and propose the constrained iterative Linear Quadratic Gaussian (CILQG) algorithm as a real-time solution. In this algorithm, we iteratively calculate a Gaussian approximation of the belief and transform the chance-constraints. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method in simulations of autonomous driving planning tasks with static and dynamic obstacles. Results show that CILQG can handle uncertainties more appropriately and has faster computation time than baseline methods.
Constrained Iterative Linear Quadratic Regulator (CILQR), a variant of ILQR, has been recently proposed for motion planning problems of autonomous vehicles to deal with constraints such as obstacle avoidance and reference tracking. However, the previous work considers either deterministic trajectories or persistent prediction for target dynamical obstacles. The other drawback is lack of generality - it requires manual weight tuning for different scenarios. In this paper, two significant improvements are achieved. Firstly, a two-stage uncertainty-aware prediction is proposed. The short-term prediction with safety guarantee based on reachability analysis is responsible for dealing with extreme maneuvers conducted by target vehicles. The long-term prediction leveraging an adaptive least square filter preserves the long-term optimality of the planned trajectory since using reachability only for long-term prediction is too pessimistic and makes the planner over-conservative. Secondly, to allow a wider coverage over different scenarios and to avoid tedious parameter tuning case by case, this paper designs a scenario-based analytical function taking the states from the ego vehicle and the target vehicle as input, and carrying weights of a cost function as output. It allows the ego vehicle to execute multiple behaviors (such as lane-keeping and overtaking) under a single planner. We demonstrate safety, effectiveness, and real-time performance of the proposed planner in simulations.
Planning whole-body motions while taking into account the terrain conditions is a challenging problem for legged robots since the terrain model might produce many local minima. Our coupled planning method uses stochastic and derivatives-free search to plan both foothold locations and horizontal motions due to the local minima produced by the terrain model. It jointly optimizes body motion, step duration and foothold selection, and it models the terrain as a cost-map. Due to the novel attitude planning method, the horizontal motion plans can be applied to various terrain conditions. The attitude planner ensures the robot stability by imposing limits to the angular acceleration. Our whole-body controller tracks compliantly trunk motions while avoiding slippage, as well as kinematic and torque limits. Despite the use of a simplified model, which is restricted to flat terrain, our approach shows remarkable capability to deal with a wide range of non-coplanar terrains. The results are validated by experimental trials and comparative evaluations in a series of terrains of progressively increasing complexity.
This paper presents a sampling-based method for optimal motion planning in non-holonomic systems in the absence of known cost functions. It uses the principle of learning through experience to deduce the cost-to-go of regions within the workspace. This cost information is used to bias an incremental graph-based search algorithm that produces solution trajectories. Iterative improvement of cost information and search biasing produces solutions that are proven to be asymptotically optimal. The proposed framework builds on incremental Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) for random sampling-based search and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to learn workspace costs. A series of experiments were performed to evaluate and demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.
In this paper, we present a motion planning framework for multi-modal vehicle dynamics. Our proposed algorithm employs transcription of the optimization objective function, vehicle dynamics, and state and control constraints into sparse factor graphs, which -- combined with mode transition constraints -- constitute a composite pose graph. By formulating the multi-modal motion planning problem in composite pose graph form, we enable utilization of efficient techniques for optimization on sparse graphs, such as those widely applied in dual estimation problems, e.g., simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). The resulting motion planning algorithm optimizes the multi-modal trajectory, including the location of mode transitions, and is guided by the pose graph optimization process to eliminate unnecessary transitions, enabling efficient discovery of optimized mode sequences from rough initial guesses. We demonstrate multi-modal trajectory optimization in both simulation and real-world experiments for vehicles with various dynamics models, such as an airplane with taxi and flight modes, and a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) fixed-wing aircraft that transitions between hover and horizontal flight modes.