1,353 research outputs found
Provably Safe Robot Navigation with Obstacle Uncertainty
As drones and autonomous cars become more widespread it is becoming
increasingly important that robots can operate safely under realistic
conditions. The noisy information fed into real systems means that robots must
use estimates of the environment to plan navigation. Efficiently guaranteeing
that the resulting motion plans are safe under these circumstances has proved
difficult. We examine how to guarantee that a trajectory or policy is safe with
only imperfect observations of the environment. We examine the implications of
various mathematical formalisms of safety and arrive at a mathematical notion
of safety of a long-term execution, even when conditioned on observational
information. We present efficient algorithms that can prove that trajectories
or policies are safe with much tighter bounds than in previous work. Notably,
the complexity of the environment does not affect our methods ability to
evaluate if a trajectory or policy is safe. We then use these safety checking
methods to design a safe variant of the RRT planning algorithm.Comment: RSS 201
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
PDDLStream: Integrating Symbolic Planners and Blackbox Samplers via Optimistic Adaptive Planning
Many planning applications involve complex relationships defined on
high-dimensional, continuous variables. For example, robotic manipulation
requires planning with kinematic, collision, visibility, and motion constraints
involving robot configurations, object poses, and robot trajectories. These
constraints typically require specialized procedures to sample satisfying
values. We extend PDDL to support a generic, declarative specification for
these procedures that treats their implementation as black boxes. We provide
domain-independent algorithms that reduce PDDLStream problems to a sequence of
finite PDDL problems. We also introduce an algorithm that dynamically balances
exploring new candidate plans and exploiting existing ones. This enables the
algorithm to greedily search the space of parameter bindings to more quickly
solve tightly-constrained problems as well as locally optimize to produce
low-cost solutions. We evaluate our algorithms on three simulated robotic
planning domains as well as several real-world robotic tasks.Comment: International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS)
202
Active model learning and diverse action sampling for task and motion planning
The objective of this work is to augment the basic abilities of a robot by
learning to use new sensorimotor primitives to enable the solution of complex
long-horizon problems. Solving long-horizon problems in complex domains
requires flexible generative planning that can combine primitive abilities in
novel combinations to solve problems as they arise in the world. In order to
plan to combine primitive actions, we must have models of the preconditions and
effects of those actions: under what circumstances will executing this
primitive achieve some particular effect in the world?
We use, and develop novel improvements on, state-of-the-art methods for
active learning and sampling. We use Gaussian process methods for learning the
conditions of operator effectiveness from small numbers of expensive training
examples collected by experimentation on a robot. We develop adaptive sampling
methods for generating diverse elements of continuous sets (such as robot
configurations and object poses) during planning for solving a new task, so
that planning is as efficient as possible. We demonstrate these methods in an
integrated system, combining newly learned models with an efficient
continuous-space robot task and motion planner to learn to solve long horizon
problems more efficiently than was previously possible.Comment: Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoWhBFPMfSzDbc8CYelsbHZa1d3uz-W_
Learning Three-Dimensional Shape Models for Sketch Recognition
Artifacts made by humans, such as items of furniture and houses, exhibit an enormous amount of variability in shape. In this paper, we concentrate on models of the shapes of objects that are made up of fixed collections of sub-parts whose dimensions and spatial arrangement exhibit variation. Our goals are: to learn these models from data and to use them for recognition. Our emphasis is on learning and recognition from three-dimensional data, to test the basic shape-modeling methodology. In this paper we also demonstrate how to use models learned in three dimensions for recognition of two-dimensional sketches of objects.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA
Integrated robot task and motion planning in belief space
In this paper, we describe an integrated strategy for planning, perception, state-estimation and action in complex mobile manipulation domains. The strategy is based on planning in the belief space of probability distribution over states. Our planning approach is based on hierarchical goal regression (pre-image back-chaining). We develop a vocabulary of fluents that describe sets of belief states, which are goals and subgoals in the planning process. We show that a relatively small set of symbolic operators lead to task-oriented perception in support of the manipulation goals. An implementation of this method is demonstrated in simulation and on a real PR2 robot, showing robust, flexible solution of mobile manipulation problems with multiple objects and substantial uncertainty.This work was supported in part by the NSF under Grant No. 1117325. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We also gratefully acknowledge support from ONR MURI grant N00014-09-1-1051, from AFOSR grant AOARD-104135 and from the Singapore Ministry of Education under a grant to the Singapore-MIT International Design Center. We thank Willow Garage for the use of the PR2 robot as part of the PR2 Beta Program
Phosphorus Availability Regulates TORC1 Signaling via LST8 in Chlamydomonas
Target of rapamycin complex 1 (TORC1) is a central regulator of cell growth. It balances anabolic and catabolic processes in response to nutrients, growth factors, and energy availability. Nitrogen- and carbon-containing metabolites have been shown to activate TORC1 in yeast, animals, and plants. Here, we show that phosphorus (P) regulates TORC1 signaling in the model green alga Chlamydomonas (Chlamydomonas reinhardtii) via LST8, a conserved TORC1 subunit that interacts with the kinase domain of TOR. P starvation results in a sharp decrease in LST8 abundance and downregulation of TORC1 activity. A hypomorphic lst8 mutation resulted in decreased LST8 abundance, and it both reduced TORC1 signaling and altered the cellular response to P starvation. Additionally, we found that LST8 levels and TORC1 activity were not properly regulated in a mutant defective in the transcription factor PSR1, which is the major mediator of P deprivation responses in Chlamydomonas. Unlike wild-type cells, the psr1 mutant failed to downregulate LST8 abundance and TORC1 activity when under P limitation. These results identify PSR1 as an upstream regulator of TORC1 and demonstrate that TORC1 is a key component in P signaling in Chlamydomonas.España Ministerio de EconomĂa y Competitividad (grants BFU2015-68216-P and PGC2018-099048- B-100 to J.L.C. and grant BIO2015-74432-JIN to M.E.P.-P.)National Science Foundation (CAREER award MCB-1552522 to L.M.H. and grant MCB-1616820 to J.G.U.)European Commission (grant number 750996
Integrated Robot Task and Motion Planning in the Now
This paper provides an approach to integrating geometric motion planning with logical task planning for long-horizon tasks in domains with many objects. We propose a tight integration between the logical and geometric aspects of planning. We use a logical representation which includes entities that refer to poses, grasps, paths and regions, without the need for a priori discretization. Given this representation and some simple mechanisms for geometric inference, we characterize the pre-conditions and effects of robot actions in terms of these logical entities. We then reason about the interaction of the geometric and non-geometric aspects of our domains using the general-purpose mechanism of goal regression (also known as pre-image backchaining). We propose an aggressive mechanism for temporal hierarchical decomposition, which postpones the pre-conditions of actions to create an abstraction hierarchy that both limits the lengths of plans that need to be generated and limits the set of objects relevant to each plan. We describe an implementation of this planning method and demonstrate it in a simulated kitchen environment in which it solves problems that require approximately 100 individual pick or place operations for moving multiple objects in a complex domain.This work was supported in part by the NSF under Grant No. 1117325. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We also gratefully acknowledge support from ONR MURI grant N00014-09-1-1051, from AFOSR grant AOARD-104135 and from
the Singapore Ministry of Education under a grant to the Singapore-MIT International Design Center. We thank Willow Garage for the use of the PR2 robot as part of the PR2 Beta Program
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