Deep Local Trajectory Replanning and Control for Robot Navigation

Ashwini Pokle, Roberto Martìn-Martìn ,Patrick Goebel, Vincent Chow, Hans M. Ewald, Junwei Yang, Zhenkai Wang, Amir Sadeghian, Dorsa Sadigh, Silvio Savarese and Marynel Vázquez

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Overview

We present a navigation system that combines ideas from hierarchical planning and machine learning. The system uses a traditional global planner to compute optimal paths towards a goal, and a deep local trajectory planner and velocity controller to compute motion commands. The latter components of the system adjust the behavior of the robot through attention mechanisms such that it moves towards the goal, avoids obstacles, and respects the space of nearby pedestrians. Both the structure of the proposed deep models and the use of attention mechanisms make the system's execution interpretable. Our simulation experiments suggest that the proposed architecture outperforms baselines that try to map global plan information and sensor data directly to velocity commands. In comparison to a hand-designed traditional navigation system, the proposed approach showed more consistent performance.

Links

If you find our project helpful, please consider citing us: 

@inproceedings{ashwini2019socialnav,
	title={Deep Local Trajectory Replanning and Control for Robot Navigation},
	author={Pokle, Ashwini and Martìn-Martìn, Roberto  and Goebel, Patrick and Chow, Vincent and Ewald, Hans M. and Yang, Junwei and Wang, Zhenkai and Sadeghian, Amir and Sadigh, Dorsa and Savarese, Silvio and Vázquez, Marynel},
	booktitle={Internation Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2019},
	year={2019}
}

Acknowledgements

The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) provided funds to assist with this research, but this paper solely reflects the opinions and conclusions of its authors and not TRI or any other Toyota entity.