ترغب بنشر مسار تعليمي؟ اضغط هنا

Vision-Based Goal-Conditioned Policies for Underwater Navigation in the Presence of Obstacles

167   0   0.0 ( 0 )
 نشر من قبل Travis Manderson
 تاريخ النشر 2020
  مجال البحث الهندسة المعلوماتية
والبحث باللغة English




اسأل ChatGPT حول البحث

We present Nav2Goal, a data-efficient and end-to-end learning method for goal-conditioned visual navigation. Our technique is used to train a navigation policy that enables a robot to navigate close to sparse geographic waypoints provided by a user without any prior map, all while avoiding obstacles and choosing paths that cover user-informed regions of interest. Our approach is based on recent advances in conditional imitation learning. General-purpose, safe and informative actions are demonstrated by a human expert. The learned policy is subsequently extended to be goal-conditioned by training with hindsight relabelling, guided by the robots relative localization system, which requires no additional manual annotation. We deployed our method on an underwater vehicle in the open ocean to collect scientifically relevant data of coral reefs, which allowed our robot to operate safely and autonomously, even at very close proximity to the coral. Our field deployments have demonstrated over a kilometer of autonomous visual navigation, where the robot reaches on the order of 40 waypoints, while collecting scientifically relevant data. This is done while travelling within 0.5 m altitude from sensitive corals and exhibiting significant learned agility to overcome turbulent ocean conditions and to actively avoid collisions.



قيم البحث

اقرأ أيضاً

Planning methods can solve temporally extended sequential decision making problems by composing simple behaviors. However, planning requires suitable abstractions for the states and transitions, which typically need to be designed by hand. In contras t, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire behaviors from low-level inputs directly, but often struggles with temporally extended tasks. Can we utilize reinforcement learning to automatically form the abstractions needed for planning, thus obtaining the best of both approaches? We show that goal-conditioned policies learned with RL can be incorporated into planning, so that a planner can focus on which states to reach, rather than how those states are reached. However, with complex state observations such as images, not all inputs represent valid states. We therefore also propose using a latent variable model to compactly represent the set of valid states for the planner, so that the policies provide an abstraction of actions, and the latent variable model provides an abstraction of states. We compare our method with planning-based and model-free methods and find that our method significantly outperforms prior work when evaluated on image-based robot navigation and manipulation tasks that require non-greedy, multi-staged behavior.
Learned Neural Network based policies have shown promising results for robot navigation. However, most of these approaches fall short of being used on a real robot due to the extensive simulated training they require. These simulations lack the visua ls and dynamics of the real world, which makes it infeasible to deploy on a real robot. We present a novel Neural Net based policy, NavNet, which allows for easy deployment on a real robot. It consists of two sub policies -- a high level policy which can understand real images and perform long range planning expressed in high level commands; a low level policy that can translate the long range plan into low level commands on a specific platform in a safe and robust manner. For every new deployment, the high level policy is trained on an easily obtainable scan of the environment modeling its visuals and layout. We detail the design of such an environment and how one can use it for training a final navigation policy. Further, we demonstrate a learned low-level policy. We deploy the model in a large office building and test it extensively, achieving $0.80$ success rate over long navigation runs and outperforming SLAM-based models in the same settings.
132 - Qiaoyun Wu , Jun Wang , Jing Liang 2021
This work studies the problem of image-goal navigation, which entails guiding robots with noisy sensors and controls through real crowded environments. Recent fruitful approaches rely on deep reinforcement learning and learn navigation policies in si mulation environments that are much simpler in complexity than real environments. Directly transferring these trained policies to real environments can be extremely challenging or even dangerous. We tackle this problem with a hierarchical navigation method composed of four decoupled modules. The first module maintains an obstacle map during robot navigation. The second one predicts a long-term goal on the real-time map periodically. The third one plans collision-free command sets for navigating to long-term goals, while the final module stops the robot properly near the goal image. The four modules are developed separately to suit the image-goal navigation in real crowded scenarios. In addition, the hierarchical decomposition decouples the learning of navigation goal planning, collision avoidance and navigation ending prediction, which cuts down the search space during navigation training and helps improve the generalization to previously unseen real scenes. We evaluate the method in both a simulator and the real world with a mobile robot. The results show that our method outperforms several navigation baselines and can successfully achieve navigation tasks in these scenarios.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with bioradars are a life-saving technology that can enable identification of survivors under collapsed buildings in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes or gas explosions. However, these UAV s have to be able to autonomously navigate in disaster struck environments and land on debris piles in order to accurately locate the survivors. This problem is extremely challenging as pre-existing maps cannot be leveraged for navigation due to structural changes that may have occurred. Furthermore, existing landing site detection algorithms are not suitable to identify safe landing regions on debris piles. In this work, we present a computationally efficient system for autonomous UAV navigation and landing that does not require any prior knowledge about the environment. We propose a novel landing site detection algorithm that computes costmaps based on several hazard factors including terrain flatness, steepness, depth accuracy, and energy consumption information. We also introduce a first-of-a-kind synthetic dataset of over 1.2 million images of collapsed buildings with groundtruth depth, surface normals, semantics and camera pose information. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system using experiments from a city scale hyperrealistic simulation environment and in real-world scenarios with collapsed buildings.
Imaging sonars have shown better flexibility than optical cameras in underwater localization and navigation for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). However, the sparsity of underwater acoustic features and the loss of elevation angle in sonar fram es have imposed degeneracy cases, namely under-constrained or unobservable cases according to optimization-based or EKF-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). In these cases, the relative ambiguous sensor poses and landmarks cannot be triangulated. To handle this, this paper proposes a robust imaging sonar SLAM approach based on sonar keyframes (KFs) and an elastic sliding window. The degeneracy cases are further analyzed and the triangulation property of 2D landmarks in arbitrary motion has been proved. These degeneracy cases are discriminated and the sonar KFs are selected via saliency criteria to extract and save the informative constraints from previous sonar measurements. Incorporating the inertial measurements, an elastic sliding windowed back-end optimization is proposed to mostly utilize the past salient sonar frames and also restrain the optimization scale. Comparative experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its robustness to outliers from the wrong data association, even without loop closure.
التعليقات
جاري جلب التعليقات جاري جلب التعليقات
سجل دخول لتتمكن من متابعة معايير البحث التي قمت باختيارها
mircosoft-partner

هل ترغب بارسال اشعارات عن اخر التحديثات في شمرا-اكاديميا