Now or later? Predicting and maximising success of navigation actions from long-term experience

Abstract

Abstract-In planning for deliberation or navigation in realworld robotic systems, one of the big challenges is to cope with change. It lies in the nature of planning that it has to make assumptions about the future state of the world, and the robot's chances of successively accomplishing actions in this future. Hence, a robot's plan can only be as good as its predictions about the world. In this paper, we present a novel approach to specifically represent changes that stem from periodic events in the environment (e.g. a door being opened or closed), which impact on the success probability of planned actions. We show that our approach to model the probability of action success as a set of superimposed periodic processes allows the robot to predict action outcomes in a long-term data obtained in two real-life offices better than a static model. We furthermore discuss and showcase how this knowledge gathered can be successfully employed in a probabilistic planning framework to devise better navigation plans. The key contributions of this paper are (i) the formation of the spectral model of action outcomes from non-uniform sampling, the (ii) analysis of its predictive power using two long-term datasets, and (iii) the application of the predicted outcomes in an MDP-based planning framework.

An autonomous strawberry‐harvesting robot: Design, development, integration, and field evaluation

“…In previous work we used techniques based on light detection and ranging (LIDAR) and cameras (Grimstad, Zakaria, Le, & From, ) as well as RTK‐GPS (Grimstad et al, ). The navigation system used in polytunnels in current work is based on well‐established techniques of probabilistic localization (Thrun, Burgard, & Fox, ) as well as the use of topological maps (Fentanes, Lacerda, Krajník, Hawes, & Hanheide, ). The navigation setup is briefly described in Section .…”

“…In addition to tens, or even hundreds of polytunnels on a strawberry farm, there are several other points of interest for a robot, including charging stations and cold storage units for harvested fruit. Therefore, to simplify the task of navigating this type of complex environment, a topological navigation system is employed (Fentanes et al, ). Here, a metric map is used together with a graph.…”

“…In addition to tens, or even hundreds of polytunnels on a strawberry farm, there are several other points of interest for a robot, including charging stations and cold storage units for harvested fruit. Therefore, to simplify the task of navigating this F I G U R E 2 Hardware assembly of the new strawberry-harvesting robot in a strawberry greenhouse: The robot consists mainly of a RGB-D camera, a single-rail dual-arm manipulator, two grippers, and a mobile platform [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] type of complex environment, a topological navigation system is employed (Fentanes et al, 2015). Here, a metric map is used together with a graph.…”

Time-varying Pedestrian Flow Models for Service Robots

“…Finally, the work of Krajnik et al [7] proposed to model the probability of environment states in the spectral domain, which captures cyclic (daily, weekly, yearly) patterns of environmental changes, which are often induced by humans. The concept of Frequency Map Enhancement (FreMEn) [7] was applied to a variety of scenarios, and was shown to improve both localisation [7], motion planning [26] and human-robot interaction [27].…”

A Poisson-spectral model for modelling temporal patterns in human data observed by a robot

“…The FreMEn technique is based on Fourier analysis in combination with a Bernoulli distribution to represent the binary state of data. It has been used in many applications, such as in occupancy grids to compress long-term observations [10], in topological maps to improve robotic search [11], and in path planning [12]. The technique can be applied to all models that represent the world as a set of independent components with binary states [13].…”