Down The CLiFF: Flow-aware Trajectory Planning under Motion Pattern Uncertainty

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Chittaranjan Srinivas Swaminathan, Tomasz Piotr Kucner, Martin Magnusson, Luigi Palmieri, and Achim J. Lilienthal
Down The CLiFF: Flow-aware Trajectory Planning under Motion Pattern Uncertainty
2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of flow-aware trajectory planning in dynamic environments considering flow model uncertainty. Flow-aware planning aims to plan trajectories that adhere to existing flow motion patterns in the environment, with the goal to make robots more efficient, less intrusive and safer. We use a statistical model called CLiFF-map that can map flow patterns for both continuous media and discrete objects. We propose novel cost and biasing functions for an RRT* planning algorithm, which exploits all the information available in the CLiFF-map model, including uncertainties due to flow variability or partial observability. Qualitatively, a benefit of our approach is that it can also be tuned to yield trajectories with different qualities such as exploratory or cautious, depending on application requirements. Quantitatively, we demonstrate that our approach produces more flow-compliant trajectories, compared to two baselines.

@inproceedings{Swaminathan1262737,
   author = {Swaminathan, Chittaranjan Srinivas and Kucner, Tomasz Piotr and Magnusson, Martin and Palmieri, Luigi and Lilienthal, Achim},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
    institution = {Örebro University, School of Science and Technology},
    pages = {7403--7409},
    title = {Down the CLiFF: Flow-Aware Trajectory Planning under Motion Pattern Uncertainty},
    keywords = {trajectory planning; motion patterns; flow-awareness;},
    year = {2018}
 }