In the present paper, we propose an extension of the Deep Planning Network (PlaNet), also referred to as PlaNet of the Bayesians (PlaNet-Bayes). There has been a growing demand in model predictive control (MPC) in partially observable environments in which complete information is unavailable because of, for example, lack of expensive sensors. PlaNet is a promising solution to realize such latent MPC, as it is used to train state-space models via model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) and to conduct planning in the latent space. However, recent state-of-the-art strategies mentioned in MBRR literature, such as involving uncertainty into training and planning, have not been considered, significantly suppressing the training performance. The proposed extension is to make PlaNet uncertainty-aware on the basis of Bayesian inference, in which both model and action uncertainty are incorporated. Uncertainty in latent models is represented using a neural network ensemble to approximately infer model posteriors. The ensemble of optimal action candidates is also employed to capture multimodal uncertainty in the optimality. The concept of the action ensemble relies on a general variational inference MPC (VI-MPC) framework and its instance, probabilistic action ensemble with trajectory sampling (PaETS). In this paper, we extend VI-MPC and PaETS, which have been originally introduced in previous literature, to address partially observable cases. We experimentally compare the performances on continuous control tasks, and conclude that our method can consistently improve the asymptotic performance compared with PlaNet.
Incorporating Stochastic Models of Controller Behavior into Kinodynamic Efficiently Adaptive State Lattices for Mobile Robot Motion Planning in Off-Road Environments
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory（陆军研究实验室）；Parsons（帕尔逊公司）
In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end deep neural network model for autonomous driving that takes monocular image sequence as input, and directly generates the steering control angle. Firstly, we model the end-to-end driving problem as a local path planning process. Inspired by the environmental representation in the classical planning algorithms(i.e. the beam curvature method), pixel-wise orientations are fed into the network to learn direction-aware features. Next, to handle the imbalanced distribution of steering values in training datasets, we propose an improvement on a cost-sensit…
We consider the problem of planning a collision-free path for a high-dimensional robot. Specifically, we suggest a planning framework where a motion-planning algorithm can obtain guidance from a user. In contrast to existing approaches that try to speed up planning by incorporating experiences or demonstrations ahead of planning, we suggest to seek user guidance only when the planner identifies that it ceases to make significant progress towards the goal. Guidance is provided in the form of an intermediate configuration $\hat{q}$, which is used to bias the planner to go through $\hat{q}$. We d…
Motion planning with constraints is an important part of many real-world robotic systems. In this work, we study manifold learning methods to learn such constraints from data. We explore two methods for learning implicit constraint manifolds from data: Variational Autoencoders (VAE), and a new method, Equality Constraint Manifold Neural Network (ECoMaNN). With the aim of incorporating learned constraints into a sampling-based motion planning framework, we evaluate the approaches on their ability to learn representations of constraints from various datasets and on the quality of paths produced …
Online generation of collision free trajectories is of prime importance for autonomous navigation. Dynamic environments, robot motion and sensing uncertainties adds further challenges to collision avoidance systems. This paper presents an approach for collision avoidance in dynamic environments, incorporating robot and obstacle state uncertainties. We derive a tight upper bound for collision probability between robot and obstacle and formulate it as a motion planning constraint which is solvable in real time. The proposed approach is tested in simulation considering mobile robots as well as qu…
Trajectory Planning and Control for Robotic Magnetic Manipulation
Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, School of Electrical Engineering, Aalto University（电气工程与自动化系，电气工程学院，阿alto大学）；Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Automation Technology and Mechanical Engineering, Tampere University（工程与自然科学学院，自动化技术与机械工程，塔尔基大学）
One of the fundamental challenges in realizing the potential of legged robots is generating plans to traverse challenging terrains. Control actions must be carefully selected so the robot will not crash or slip. The high dimensionality of the joint space makes directly planning low-level actions from onboard perception difficult, and control stacks that do not consider the low-level mechanisms of the robot in planning are ill-suited to handle fine-grained obstacles. One method for dealing with this is selecting footstep locations based on terrain characteristics. However, incorporating robot d…
Autonomous robots operating in large knowledgeintensive domains require planning in the discrete (task) space and the continuous (motion) space. In knowledge-intensive domains, on the one hand, robots have to reason at the highestlevel, for example the regions to navigate to or objects to be picked up and their properties; on the other hand, the feasibility of the respective navigation tasks have to be checked at the controller execution level. Moreover, employing multiple robots offer enhanced performance capabilities over a single robot performing the same task. To this end, we present an in…
In this paper, we examine the problem of push recovery for bipedal robot locomotion and present a reactive decision-making and robust planning framework for locomotion resilient to external perturbations. Rejecting perturbations is an essential capability of bipedal robots and has been widely studied in the locomotion literature. However, adversarial disturbances and aggressive turning can lead to negative lateral step width (i.e., crossed-leg scenarios) with unstable motions and self-collision risks. These motion planning problems are computationally difficult and have not been explored under…
Clemson University（克莱姆森大学）；Air Force Research Laboratory（美国空军研究实验室）
Symbolic motion planning for robots is the process of specifying and planning robot tasks in a discrete space, then carrying them out in a continuous space in a manner that preserves the discrete-level task specifications. Despite progress in symbolic motion planning, many challenges remain, including addressing scalability for multi-robot systems and improving solutions by incorporating human intelligence. In this paper, distributed symbolic motion planning for multi-robot systems is developed to address scalability. More specifically, compositional reasoning approaches are developed to decom…
Planning a time-optimal trajectory for aerial robots is critical in many drone applications, such as rescue missions and package delivery, which have been widely researched in recent years. However, it still involves several challenges, particularly when it comes to incorporating special task requirements into the planning as well as the aerial robot's dynamics. In this work, we study a case where an aerial manipulator shall hand over a parcel from a moving mobile robot in a time-optimal manner. Rather than setting up the approach trajectory manually, which makes it difficult to determine the …
Prior information is often incorporated informally when planning a clinical trial. Here, we present an approach on how to incorporate prior information, such as data from historical clinical trials, into the nuisance parameter based sample size re-estimation in a design with an internal pilot study. We focus on trials with continuous endpoints in which the outcome variance is the nuisance parameter. For planning and analyzing the trial frequentist methods are considered. Moreover, the external information on the variance is summarized by the Bayesian meta-analytic-predictive (MAP) approach. To…
State Key Laboratory of High Performance Computing (HPCL)（高性能计算国家重点实验室）；School of Computer, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学计算机学院）
Recent years have witnessed the prosperity of robots and in order to support consensus and cooperation for multi-robot system, wireless communications and networking among robots and the infrastructure have become indispensable. In this technical note, we first provide an overview of the research contributions on communication-aware motion planning (CAMP) in designing wireless-connected robotic networks (WCRNs), where the degree-of-freedom (DoF) provided by motion and communication capabilities embraced by the robots have not been fully exploited. Therefore, we propose the framework of joint c…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Medical steerable needles can follow 3D curvilinear trajectories inside body tissue, enabling them to move around critical anatomical structures and precisely reach clinically significant targets in a minimally invasive way. Automating needle steering, with motion planning as a key component, has the potential to maximize the accuracy, precision, speed, and safety of steerable needle procedures. In this paper, we introduce the first resolution-optimal motion planner for steerable needles that offers excellent practical performance in terms of runtime while simultaneously providing strong theor…
Informative path planning is an important and challenging problem in robotics that remains to be solved in a manner that allows for wide-spread implementation and real-world practical adoption. Among various reasons for this, one is the lack of approaches that allow for informative path planning in high-dimensional spaces and non-trivial sensor constraints. In this work we present a sampling-based approach that allows us to tackle the challenges of large and high-dimensional search spaces. This is done by performing informed sampling in the high-dimensional continuous space and incorporating p…
This paper studies the problem of fast and safe aerial payload transport by a single quadcopter in urban areas. The quadcopter payload system (QPS) is considered as a rigid body and modeled with a nonlinear dynamics. The urban area is modeled as an obstacle-laden environment with obstacle geometries obtained by incorporating realistic LIDAR data. Our approach for payload transport is decomposed into high-level motion planning and low-level trajectory control. For the low-level trajectory tracking, a feedback linearization control is applied to stably track the desired trajectory of the quadcop…
FlowMP: Learning Motion Fields for Robot Planning with Conditional Flow Matching
University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；German Research Center for AI (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）；Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) GmbH（奥地利技术研究院）
An Optimized Path Planning of Manipulator Using Spline Curves and Real Quantifier Elimination Based on Comprehensive Gröbner Systems
Graduate School of Pure and Applied Sciences, University of Tsukuba（筑波大学文理学研究院）；Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences, University of Tsukuba（筑波大学文理学院）；Faculty of Library, Information and Media Science, University of Tsukuba（筑波大学图书馆、信息与媒体科学学院）
本文提出利用Comprehensive Gröbner System (CGS)与CGS-QE方法高效求解机械臂逆运动学并认证轨迹解，结合三次样条插值与最短路径算法实现路径与关节配置的优化规划。
Motion planning is a fundamental problem and focuses on finding control inputs that enable a robot to reach a goal region while safely avoiding obstacles. However, in many situations, the state of the system may not be known but only estimated using, for instance, a Kalman filter. This results in a novel motion planning problem where safety must be ensured in the presence of state estimation uncertainty. Previous approaches to this problem are either conservative or integrate state estimates optimistically which leads to non-robust solutions. Optimistic solutions require frequent replanning to…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；The University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）
We consider the problem of optimal reactive synthesis - compute a strategy that satisfies a mission specification in a dynamic environment, and optimizes a performance metric. We incorporate task-critical information, that is only available at runtime, into the strategy synthesis in order to improve performance. Existing approaches to utilising such time-varying information require online re-synthesis, which is not computationally feasible in real-time applications. In this paper, we pre-synthesize a set of strategies corresponding to candidate instantiations (pre-specified representative info…
Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Sarajevo（萨拉热窝大学）
This paper presents a novel hierarchical motion planning approach based on Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees (RRT) for global planning and Model Predictive Control (MPC) for local planning. The approach targets a three-wheeled cycle rickshaw (trishaw) used for autonomous urban transportation in shared spaces. Due to the nature of the vehicle, the algorithms had to be adapted in order to adhere to non-holonomic kinematic constraints using the Kinematic Single-Track Model. The vehicle is designed to offer transportation for people and goods in shared environments such as roads, sidewalks, bicycle l…
iA*: Imperative Learning-based A* Search for Path Planning
Spatial AI & Robotics (SAIR) Lab, Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo（空间人工智能与机器人实验室，人工智能与数据科学研究所，计算机科学与工程系，布法罗大学）
Quantum-Assisted Automatic Path-Planning for Robotic Quality Inspection in Industry 4.0
TECNALIA, Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA)（TECNALIA，巴斯克研究与技术联盟）；Department of Mechanical, Energy and Management Engineering, University of Calabria（机械、能源与管理工程系，卡拉布里亚大学）
Rapid and reliable robot bin picking is a critical challenge in automating warehouses, often measured in picks-per-hour (PPH). We explore increasing PPH using faster motions based on optimizing over a set of candidate grasps. The source of this set of grasps is two-fold: (1) grasp-analysis tools such as Dex-Net generate multiple candidate grasps, and (2) each of these grasps has a degree of freedom about which a robot gripper can rotate. In this paper, we present Grasp-Optimized Motion Planning (GOMP), an algorithm that speeds up the execution of a bin-picking robot's operations by incorporati…
Enhancing Social Robot Navigation with Integrated Motion Prediction and Trajectory Planning in Dynamic Human Environments
School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（日本先进科学技术学院信息科学学院）；University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University Hanoi（越南国家大学河内工程技术大学）
Hybrid Dynamics Modeling and Trajectory Planning for a Cable-Trailer System with a Quadruped Robot
School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（人工智能与自动化学院，华中科技大学）；Department of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong（数据科学系，城市大学）；Embodied AI Center of Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室具身智能中心）
Learning Differentiable Reachability Maps for Optimization-based Humanoid Motion Generation
CNRS-AIST JRL (Joint Robotics Laboratory)（法国国家科学研究中心-日本产业技术综合研究所联合机器人实验室）；IRL（智能机器人实验室）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（国家先进工业科学与技术研究所）
Control Barrier Functions (CBF) are widely used to enforce the safety-critical constraints on nonlinear systems. Recently, these functions are being incorporated into a path planning framework to design safety-critical path planners. However, these methods fall short of providing a realistic path considering both the algorithm's run-time complexity and enforcement of the safety-critical constraints. This paper proposes a novel motion planning approach using the well-known Rapidly Exploring Random Trees (RRT) algorithm that enforces both CBF and the robot Kinodynamic constraints to generate a s…
