9,584 research outputs found
A Hierarchal Planning Framework for AUV Mission Management in a Spatio-Temporal Varying Ocean
The purpose of this paper is to provide a hierarchical dynamic mission
planning framework for a single autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to
accomplish task-assign process in a limited time interval while operating in an
uncertain undersea environment, where spatio-temporal variability of the
operating field is taken into account. To this end, a high level reactive
mission planner and a low level motion planning system are constructed. The
high level system is responsible for task priority assignment and guiding the
vehicle toward a target of interest considering on-time termination of the
mission. The lower layer is in charge of generating optimal trajectories based
on sequence of tasks and dynamicity of operating terrain. The mission planner
is able to reactively re-arrange the tasks based on mission/terrain updates
while the low level planner is capable of coping unexpected changes of the
terrain by correcting the old path and re-generating a new trajectory. As a
result, the vehicle is able to undertake the maximum number of tasks with
certain degree of maneuverability having situational awareness of the operating
field. The computational engine of the mentioned framework is based on the
biogeography based optimization (BBO) algorithm that is capable of providing
efficient solutions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework,
firstly, a realistic model of undersea environment is provided based on
realistic map data, and then several scenarios, treated as real experiments,
are designed through the simulation study. Additionally, to show the robustness
and reliability of the framework, Monte-Carlo simulation is carried out and
statistical analysis is performed. The results of simulations indicate the
significant potential of the two-level hierarchical mission planning system in
mission success and its applicability for real-time implementation
Multilayer Graph-Based Trajectory Planning for Race Vehicles in Dynamic Scenarios
Trajectory planning at high velocities and at the handling limits is a
challenging task. In order to cope with the requirements of a race scenario, we
propose a far-sighted two step, multi-layered graph-based trajectory planner,
capable to run with speeds up to 212~km/h. The planner is designed to generate
an action set of multiple drivable trajectories, allowing an adjacent behavior
planner to pick the most appropriate action for the global state in the scene.
This method serves objectives such as race line tracking, following, stopping,
overtaking and a velocity profile which enables a handling of the vehicle at
the limit of friction. Thereby, it provides a high update rate, a far planning
horizon and solutions to non-convex scenarios. The capabilities of the proposed
method are demonstrated in simulation and on a real race vehicle.Comment: Accepted at The 22nd IEEE International Conference on Intelligent
Transportation Systems, October 27 - 30, 201
Navigating Occluded Intersections with Autonomous Vehicles using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Providing an efficient strategy to navigate safely through unsignaled
intersections is a difficult task that requires determining the intent of other
drivers. We explore the effectiveness of Deep Reinforcement Learning to handle
intersection problems. Using recent advances in Deep RL, we are able to learn
policies that surpass the performance of a commonly-used heuristic approach in
several metrics including task completion time and goal success rate and have
limited ability to generalize. We then explore a system's ability to learn
active sensing behaviors to enable navigating safely in the case of occlusions.
Our analysis, provides insight into the intersection handling problem, the
solutions learned by the network point out several shortcomings of current
rule-based methods, and the failures of our current deep reinforcement learning
system point to future research directions.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2018
Time-optimal Coordination of Mobile Robots along Specified Paths
In this paper, we address the problem of time-optimal coordination of mobile
robots under kinodynamic constraints along specified paths. We propose a novel
approach based on time discretization that leads to a mixed-integer linear
programming (MILP) formulation. This problem can be solved using
general-purpose MILP solvers in a reasonable time, resulting in a
resolution-optimal solution. Moreover, unlike previous work found in the
literature, our formulation allows an exact linear modeling (up to the
discretization resolution) of second-order dynamic constraints. Extensive
simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Published in 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS
Experience-Based Planning with Sparse Roadmap Spanners
We present an experienced-based planning framework called Thunder that learns
to reduce computation time required to solve high-dimensional planning problems
in varying environments. The approach is especially suited for large
configuration spaces that include many invariant constraints, such as those
found with whole body humanoid motion planning. Experiences are generated using
probabilistic sampling and stored in a sparse roadmap spanner (SPARS), which
provides asymptotically near-optimal coverage of the configuration space,
making storing, retrieving, and repairing past experiences very efficient with
respect to memory and time. The Thunder framework improves upon past
experience-based planners by storing experiences in a graph rather than in
individual paths, eliminating redundant information, providing more
opportunities for path reuse, and providing a theoretical limit to the size of
the experience graph. These properties also lead to improved handling of
dynamically changing environments, reasoning about optimal paths, and reducing
query resolution time. The approach is demonstrated on a 30 degrees of freedom
humanoid robot and compared with the Lightning framework, an experience-based
planner that uses individual paths to store past experiences. In environments
with variable obstacles and stability constraints, experiments show that
Thunder is on average an order of magnitude faster than Lightning and planning
from scratch. Thunder also uses 98.8% less memory to store its experiences
after 10,000 trials when compared to Lightning. Our framework is implemented
and freely available in the Open Motion Planning Library.Comment: Submitted to ICRA 201
A Data-driven Model for Interaction-aware Pedestrian Motion Prediction in Object Cluttered Environments
This paper reports on a data-driven, interaction-aware motion prediction
approach for pedestrians in environments cluttered with static obstacles. When
navigating in such workspaces shared with humans, robots need accurate motion
predictions of the surrounding pedestrians. Human navigation behavior is mostly
influenced by their surrounding pedestrians and by the static obstacles in
their vicinity. In this paper we introduce a new model based on Long-Short Term
Memory (LSTM) neural networks, which is able to learn human motion behavior
from demonstrated data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
approach using LSTMs, that incorporates both static obstacles and surrounding
pedestrians for trajectory forecasting. As part of the model, we introduce a
new way of encoding surrounding pedestrians based on a 1d-grid in polar angle
space. We evaluate the benefit of interaction-aware motion prediction and the
added value of incorporating static obstacles on both simulation and real-world
datasets by comparing with state-of-the-art approaches. The results show, that
our new approach outperforms the other approaches while being very
computationally efficient and that taking into account static obstacles for
motion predictions significantly improves the prediction accuracy, especially
in cluttered environments.Comment: 8 pages, accepted for publication at the IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 201
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