8,145 research outputs found
Real-Time Predictive Modeling and Robust Avoidance of Pedestrians with Uncertain, Changing Intentions
To plan safe trajectories in urban environments, autonomous vehicles must be
able to quickly assess the future intentions of dynamic agents. Pedestrians are
particularly challenging to model, as their motion patterns are often uncertain
and/or unknown a priori. This paper presents a novel changepoint detection and
clustering algorithm that, when coupled with offline unsupervised learning of a
Gaussian process mixture model (DPGP), enables quick detection of changes in
intent and online learning of motion patterns not seen in prior training data.
The resulting long-term movement predictions demonstrate improved accuracy
relative to offline learning alone, in terms of both intent and trajectory
prediction. By embedding these predictions within a chance-constrained motion
planner, trajectories which are probabilistically safe to pedestrian motions
can be identified in real-time. Hardware experiments demonstrate that this
approach can accurately predict pedestrian motion patterns from onboard
sensor/perception data and facilitate robust navigation within a dynamic
environment.Comment: Submitted to 2014 International Workshop on the Algorithmic
Foundations of Robotic
Reset-free Trial-and-Error Learning for Robot Damage Recovery
The high probability of hardware failures prevents many advanced robots
(e.g., legged robots) from being confidently deployed in real-world situations
(e.g., post-disaster rescue). Instead of attempting to diagnose the failures,
robots could adapt by trial-and-error in order to be able to complete their
tasks. In this situation, damage recovery can be seen as a Reinforcement
Learning (RL) problem. However, the best RL algorithms for robotics require the
robot and the environment to be reset to an initial state after each episode,
that is, the robot is not learning autonomously. In addition, most of the RL
methods for robotics do not scale well with complex robots (e.g., walking
robots) and either cannot be used at all or take too long to converge to a
solution (e.g., hours of learning). In this paper, we introduce a novel
learning algorithm called "Reset-free Trial-and-Error" (RTE) that (1) breaks
the complexity by pre-generating hundreds of possible behaviors with a dynamics
simulator of the intact robot, and (2) allows complex robots to quickly recover
from damage while completing their tasks and taking the environment into
account. We evaluate our algorithm on a simulated wheeled robot, a simulated
six-legged robot, and a real six-legged walking robot that are damaged in
several ways (e.g., a missing leg, a shortened leg, faulty motor, etc.) and
whose objective is to reach a sequence of targets in an arena. Our experiments
show that the robots can recover most of their locomotion abilities in an
environment with obstacles, and without any human intervention.Comment: 18 pages, 16 figures, 3 tables, 6 pseudocodes/algorithms, video at
https://youtu.be/IqtyHFrb3BU, code at
https://github.com/resibots/chatzilygeroudis_2018_rt
Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey
With growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments,
the ability of such systems to perceive, understand and anticipate human
behavior becomes increasingly important. Specifically, predicting future
positions of dynamic agents and planning considering such predictions are key
tasks for self-driving vehicles, service robots and advanced surveillance
systems. This paper provides a survey of human motion trajectory prediction. We
review, analyze and structure a large selection of work from different
communities and propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods based on
the motion modeling approach and level of contextual information used. We
provide an overview of the existing datasets and performance metrics. We
discuss limitations of the state of the art and outline directions for further
research.Comment: Submitted to the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR),
37 page
Closed-loop Bayesian Semantic Data Fusion for Collaborative Human-Autonomy Target Search
In search applications, autonomous unmanned vehicles must be able to
efficiently reacquire and localize mobile targets that can remain out of view
for long periods of time in large spaces. As such, all available information
sources must be actively leveraged -- including imprecise but readily available
semantic observations provided by humans. To achieve this, this work develops
and validates a novel collaborative human-machine sensing solution for dynamic
target search. Our approach uses continuous partially observable Markov
decision process (CPOMDP) planning to generate vehicle trajectories that
optimally exploit imperfect detection data from onboard sensors, as well as
semantic natural language observations that can be specifically requested from
human sensors. The key innovation is a scalable hierarchical Gaussian mixture
model formulation for efficiently solving CPOMDPs with semantic observations in
continuous dynamic state spaces. The approach is demonstrated and validated
with a real human-robot team engaged in dynamic indoor target search and
capture scenarios on a custom testbed.Comment: Final version accepted and submitted to 2018 FUSION Conference
(Cambridge, UK, July 2018
Towards adaptive multi-robot systems: self-organization and self-adaptation
Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The development of complex systems ensembles that operate in uncertain environments is a major challenge. The reason for this is that system designers are not able to fully specify the system during specification and development and before it is being deployed. Natural swarm systems enjoy similar characteristics, yet, being self-adaptive and being able to self-organize, these systems show beneficial emergent behaviour. Similar concepts can be extremely helpful for artificial systems, especially when it comes to multi-robot scenarios, which require such solution in order to be applicable to highly uncertain real world application. In this article, we present a comprehensive overview over state-of-the-art solutions in emergent systems, self-organization, self-adaptation, and robotics. We discuss these approaches in the light of a framework for multi-robot systems and identify similarities, differences missing links and open gaps that have to be addressed in order to make this framework possible
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