Generative Adversarial Network Based Heuristics for Sampling-Based Path Planning

Sampling-based path planning is a popular methodology for robot path planning.With a uniform sampling strategy to explore the state space,a feasible path can be found without the complex geometric modeling of the configuration space.However,the quality of the initial solution is not guaranteed,and the convergence speed to the optimal solution is slow.In this paper,we present a novel image-based path planning algorithm to overcome these limitations.Specifically,a generative adversarial network(GAN)is designed to take the environment map(denoted as RGB image)as the input without other preprocessing works.The output is also an RGB image where the promising region(where a feasible path probably exists)is segmented.This promising region is utilized as a heuristic to achieve non-uniform sampling for the path planner.We conduct a number of simulation experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method,and the results demonstrate that our method performs much better in terms of the quality of the initial solution and the convergence speed to the optimal solution.Furthermore,apart from the environments similar to the training set,our method also works well on the environments which are very different from the training set.

An Adaptive Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree

Sampling-based planning algorithms play an important role in high degree-of-freedom motion planning(MP)problems,in which rapidly-exploring random tree(RRT)and the faster bidirectional RRT(named RRT-Connect)algorithms have achieved good results in many planning tasks.However,sampling-based methods have the inherent defect of having difficultly in solving planning problems with narrow passages.Therefore,several algorithms have been proposed to overcome these drawbacks.As one of the improved algorithms,Rapidlyexploring random vines(RRV)can achieve better results,but it may perform worse in cluttered environments and has a certain environmental selectivity.In this paper,we present a new improved planning method based on RRT-Connect and RRV,named adaptive RRT-Connect(ARRT-Connect),which deals well with the narrow passage environments while retaining the ability of RRT algorithms to plan paths in other environments.The proposed planner is shown to be adaptable to a variety of environments and can accomplish path planning in a short time.

Graph neural network based method for robot path planning

Sampling-based path planning is widely used in robotics,particularly in high-dimensional state spaces.In the path planning process,collision detection is the most time-consuming operation.Therefore,we propose a learning-based path planning method that reduces the number of collision checks.We develop an efficient neural network model based on graph neural networks.The model outputs weights for each neighbor based on the obstacle,searched path,and random geometric graph,which are used to guide the planner in avoiding obstacles.We evaluate the efficiency of the proposed path planning method through simulated random worlds and real-world experiments.The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces the number of collision checks and improves the path planning speed in high-dimensional environments.