Authors: Jory Denny, Read Sandström, Nicole Julian, Nancy M. Amato

Venue: Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics XI: Selected Contributions of the Eleventh International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-16595-0_8
Link to Publication

Abstract:
Motion planning has seen much attention over the past two decades. A great deal of progress has been made in sampling-based planning, whereby a planner builds an approximate representation of the planning space. While these planners have demonstrated success in many scenarios, there are still difficult problems where they lack robustness or efficiency, e.g., certain types of narrow spaces. Conversely, human intuition can often determine an approximate solution to these problems quite effectively, but humans lack the speed and precision necessary to perform the corresponding low-level tasks (such as collision checking) in a timely manner. In this work, we introduce a novel strategy called Region Steering in which the user and a PRM planner work cooperatively to map the space while maintaining the probabilistic completeness property of the PRM planner. Region Steering utilizes two-way communication to integrate the strengths of both the user and the planner, thereby overcoming the weaknesses inherent to relying on either one alone. In one communication direction, a user can input regions, or bounding volumes in the workspace, to bias sampling towards or away from these areas. In the other direction, the planner displays its progress to the user and colors the regions based on their perceived usefulness. We demonstrate that Region Steering provides roadmap customizability, reduced mapping time, and smaller roadmap sizes compared with fully automated PRMs, e.g., Gaussian PRM. 

@inbook{Denny-arsfcr-2014, 
 address = {Cham}, 
 author = {Denny, Jory 
and Sandstr{\"o}m, Read 
and Julian, Nicole 
and Amato, Nancy M.}, 
 booktitle = {Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics XI: Selected Contributions of the Eleventh International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics}, 
 doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-16595-0_8}, 
 editor = {Akin, H. Levent 
and Amato, Nancy M. 
and Isler, Volkan 
and van der Stappen, A. Frank}, 
 isbn = {978-3-319-16595-0}, 
 pages = {125--141}, 
 publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, 
 title = {A Region-Based Strategy for Collaborative Roadmap Construction}, 
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16595-0_8}, 
 year = {2015} 
}