1,600 research outputs found
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
Sampling-Based Methods for Factored Task and Motion Planning
This paper presents a general-purpose formulation of a large class of
discrete-time planning problems, with hybrid state and control-spaces, as
factored transition systems. Factoring allows state transitions to be described
as the intersection of several constraints each affecting a subset of the state
and control variables. Robotic manipulation problems with many movable objects
involve constraints that only affect several variables at a time and therefore
exhibit large amounts of factoring. We develop a theoretical framework for
solving factored transition systems with sampling-based algorithms. The
framework characterizes conditions on the submanifold in which solutions lie,
leading to a characterization of robust feasibility that incorporates
dimensionality-reducing constraints. It then connects those conditions to
corresponding conditional samplers that can be composed to produce values on
this submanifold. We present two domain-independent, probabilistically complete
planning algorithms that take, as input, a set of conditional samplers. We
demonstrate the empirical efficiency of these algorithms on a set of
challenging task and motion planning problems involving picking, placing, and
pushing
Batch Informed Trees (BIT*): Sampling-based Optimal Planning via the Heuristically Guided Search of Implicit Random Geometric Graphs
In this paper, we present Batch Informed Trees (BIT*), a planning algorithm
based on unifying graph- and sampling-based planning techniques. By recognizing
that a set of samples describes an implicit random geometric graph (RGG), we
are able to combine the efficient ordered nature of graph-based techniques,
such as A*, with the anytime scalability of sampling-based algorithms, such as
Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT).
BIT* uses a heuristic to efficiently search a series of increasingly dense
implicit RGGs while reusing previous information. It can be viewed as an
extension of incremental graph-search techniques, such as Lifelong Planning A*
(LPA*), to continuous problem domains as well as a generalization of existing
sampling-based optimal planners. It is shown that it is probabilistically
complete and asymptotically optimal.
We demonstrate the utility of BIT* on simulated random worlds in
and and manipulation problems on CMU's HERB, a
14-DOF two-armed robot. On these problems, BIT* finds better solutions faster
than RRT, RRT*, Informed RRT*, and Fast Marching Trees (FMT*) with faster
anytime convergence towards the optimum, especially in high dimensions.Comment: 8 Pages. 6 Figures. Video available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQIoCC48gp
- …