Learned Sampling Distributions for Efficient Planning in Hybrid Geometric and Object-Level Representations

© 2020 IEEE. We would like to enable a robotic agent to quickly and intelligently find promising trajectories through structured, unknown environments. Many approaches to navigation in unknown environments are limited to considering geometric information only, which leads to myopic behavior. In this...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Katherine, Stadler, Martina, Roy, Nicholas
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137313
Description
Summary:© 2020 IEEE. We would like to enable a robotic agent to quickly and intelligently find promising trajectories through structured, unknown environments. Many approaches to navigation in unknown environments are limited to considering geometric information only, which leads to myopic behavior. In this work, we show that learning a sampling distribution that incorporates both geometric information and explicit, object-level semantics for sampling-based planners enables efficient planning at longer horizons in partially-known environments. We demonstrate that our learned planner is up to 2.7 times more likely to find a plan than the baseline, and can result in up to a 16% reduction in traversal costs as calculated by linear regression. We also show promising qualitative results on real-world data.