A mosaic of eyes

Autonomous navigation is a traditional research topic in intelligent robotics and vehicles, which requires a robot to perceive its environment through onboard sensors such as cameras or laser scanners, to enable it to drive to its goal. Most research to date has focused on the development of a large and smart brain to gain autonomous capability for robots. There are three fundamental questions to be answered by an autonomous mobile robot: 1) Where am I going? 2) Where am I? and 3) How do I get there? To answer these basic questions, a robot requires a massive spatial memory and considerable computational resources to accomplish perception, localization, path planning, and control. It is not yet possible to deliver the centralized intelligence required for our real-life applications, such as autonomous ground vehicles and wheelchairs in care centers. In fact, most autonomous robots try to mimic how humans navigate, interpreting images taken by cameras and then taking decisions accordingly. They may encounter the following difficulties

PRM-RL: Long-range Robotic Navigation Tasks by Combining Reinforcement Learning and Sampling-based Planning

We present PRM-RL, a hierarchical method for long-range navigation task completion that combines sampling based path planning with reinforcement learning (RL). The RL agents learn short-range, point-to-point navigation policies that capture robot dynamics and task constraints without knowledge of the large-scale topology. Next, the sampling-based planners provide roadmaps which connect robot configurations that can be successfully navigated by the RL agent. The same RL agents are used to control the robot under the direction of the planning, enabling long-range navigation. We use the Probabilistic Roadmaps (PRMs) for the sampling-based planner. The RL agents are constructed using feature-based and deep neural net policies in continuous state and action spaces. We evaluate PRM-RL, both in simulation and on-robot, on two navigation tasks with non-trivial robot dynamics: end-to-end differential drive indoor navigation in office environments, and aerial cargo delivery in urban environments with load displacement constraints. Our results show improvement in task completion over both RL agents on their own and traditional sampling-based planners. In the indoor navigation task, PRM-RL successfully completes up to 215 m long trajectories under noisy sensor conditions, and the aerial cargo delivery completes flights over 1000 m without violating the task constraints in an environment 63 million times larger than used in training.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

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