Inference and Decision in Credal Occupancy Grids: Use Case on Trajectory Planning

Abstract

Occupancy grids are common tools used in robotics to represent the robot environment, and that may be used to plan trajectories, select additional measurements to acquire, etc. However, deriving information about those occupancy grids from sensor measurements often induce a lot of uncertainty, especially for grid elements that correspond to occluded or far away area from the robot. This means that occupancy information may be quite uncertain and imprecise at some places, while being very accurate at others. Modelling finely this occupancy information is essential to decide the optimal action the robot should take, but a refined modelling of uncertainty often implies a higher computational cost, a prohibitive feature for real-time applications. In this paper, we introduce the notion of credal occupancy grids, using the very general theory of imprecise probabilities to model occupancy uncertainty. We also show how one can perform efficient, real-time inferences with such a model, and show a use-case applying the model to an autonomous vehicle trajectory planning problem.