3,230 research outputs found
Role Playing Learning for Socially Concomitant Mobile Robot Navigation
In this paper, we present the Role Playing Learning (RPL) scheme for a mobile
robot to navigate socially with its human companion in populated environments.
Neural networks (NN) are constructed to parameterize a stochastic policy that
directly maps sensory data collected by the robot to its velocity outputs,
while respecting a set of social norms. An efficient simulative learning
environment is built with maps and pedestrians trajectories collected from a
number of real-world crowd data sets. In each learning iteration, a robot
equipped with the NN policy is created virtually in the learning environment to
play itself as a companied pedestrian and navigate towards a goal in a socially
concomitant manner. Thus, we call this process Role Playing Learning, which is
formulated under a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. The NN policy is
optimized end-to-end using Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), with
consideration of the imperfectness of robot's sensor measurements. Simulative
and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the efficacy and
superiority of our method
A robot swarm assisting a human fire-fighter
Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire-fighters. The large dimensions, together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The GUARDIANS robot swarm is designed to assist fire-fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting fire-fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms that provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus, the robot swarm is able to provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the fire-fighters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire-fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm-based information to human beings
Topomap: Topological Mapping and Navigation Based on Visual SLAM Maps
Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semi-structured environments
deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning
algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many
state-of-the-art navigation approaches only operate locally instead of gaining
a more conceptual understanding of the planning objective. This limits the
complexity of tasks a robot can accomplish and makes it harder to deal with
uncertainties that are present in the context of real-time robotics
applications. In this work, we present Topomap, a framework which simplifies
the navigation task by providing a map to the robot which is tailored for path
planning use. This novel approach transforms a sparse feature-based map from a
visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) system into a
three-dimensional topological map. This is done in two steps. First, we extract
occupancy information directly from the noisy sparse point cloud. Then, we
create a set of convex free-space clusters, which are the vertices of the
topological map. We show that this representation improves the efficiency of
global planning, and we provide a complete derivation of our algorithm.
Planning experiments on real world datasets demonstrate that we achieve similar
performance as RRT* with significantly lower computation times and storage
requirements. Finally, we test our algorithm on a mobile robotic platform to
prove its advantages.Comment: 8 page
ViNL: Visual Navigation and Locomotion Over Obstacles
We present Visual Navigation and Locomotion over obstacles (ViNL), which
enables a quadrupedal robot to navigate unseen apartments while stepping over
small obstacles that lie in its path (e.g., shoes, toys, cables), similar to
how humans and pets lift their feet over objects as they walk. ViNL consists
of: (1) a visual navigation policy that outputs linear and angular velocity
commands that guides the robot to a goal coordinate in unfamiliar indoor
environments; and (2) a visual locomotion policy that controls the robot's
joints to avoid stepping on obstacles while following provided velocity
commands. Both the policies are entirely "model-free", i.e. sensors-to-actions
neural networks trained end-to-end. The two are trained independently in two
entirely different simulators and then seamlessly co-deployed by feeding the
velocity commands from the navigator to the locomotor, entirely "zero-shot"
(without any co-training). While prior works have developed learning methods
for visual navigation or visual locomotion, to the best of our knowledge, this
is the first fully learned approach that leverages vision to accomplish both
(1) intelligent navigation in new environments, and (2) intelligent visual
locomotion that aims to traverse cluttered environments without disrupting
obstacles. On the task of navigation to distant goals in unknown environments,
ViNL using just egocentric vision significantly outperforms prior work on
robust locomotion using privileged terrain maps (+32.8% success and -4.42
collisions per meter). Additionally, we ablate our locomotion policy to show
that each aspect of our approach helps reduce obstacle collisions. Videos and
code at http://www.joannetruong.com/projects/vinl.htm
Socially Compliant Navigation Dataset (SCAND): A Large-Scale Dataset of Demonstrations for Social Navigation
Social navigation is the capability of an autonomous agent, such as a robot,
to navigate in a 'socially compliant' manner in the presence of other
intelligent agents such as humans. With the emergence of autonomously
navigating mobile robots in human populated environments (e.g., domestic
service robots in homes and restaurants and food delivery robots on public
sidewalks), incorporating socially compliant navigation behaviors on these
robots becomes critical to ensuring safe and comfortable human robot
coexistence. To address this challenge, imitation learning is a promising
framework, since it is easier for humans to demonstrate the task of social
navigation rather than to formulate reward functions that accurately capture
the complex multi objective setting of social navigation. The use of imitation
learning and inverse reinforcement learning to social navigation for mobile
robots, however, is currently hindered by a lack of large scale datasets that
capture socially compliant robot navigation demonstrations in the wild. To fill
this gap, we introduce Socially CompliAnt Navigation Dataset (SCAND) a large
scale, first person view dataset of socially compliant navigation
demonstrations. Our dataset contains 8.7 hours, 138 trajectories, 25 miles of
socially compliant, human teleoperated driving demonstrations that comprises
multi modal data streams including 3D lidar, joystick commands, odometry,
visual and inertial information, collected on two morphologically different
mobile robots a Boston Dynamics Spot and a Clearpath Jackal by four different
human demonstrators in both indoor and outdoor environments. We additionally
perform preliminary analysis and validation through real world robot
experiments and show that navigation policies learned by imitation learning on
SCAND generate socially compliant behavior
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