Title
Long-Range Indoor Navigation With PRM-RL
Abstract
Long-range indoor navigation requires guiding robots with noisy sensors and controls through cluttered environments along paths that span a variety of buildings. We achieve this with PRM-RL, a hierarchical robot navigation method in which reinforcement learning (RL) agents that map noisy sensors to robot controls learn to solve short-range obstacle avoidance tasks, and then sampling-based planners map where these agents can reliably navigate in simulation; these roadmaps and agents are then deployed on robots, guiding them along the shortest path where the agents are likely to succeed. In this article, we use probabilistic roadmaps (PRMs) as the sampling-based planner, and AutoRL as the RL method in the indoor navigation context. We evaluate the method with a simulation for kinematic differential drive and kinodynamic car-like robots in several environments, and on differential-drive robots at three physical sites. Our results show that PRM-RL with AutoRL is more successful than several baselines, is robust to noise, and can guide robots over hundreds of meters in the face of noise and obstacles in both simulation and on robots, including over 5.8 km of physical robot navigation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TRO.2020.2975428
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Probabilistic roadmaps (PRMs),reinforcement learning (RL),robotics,navigation,sampling-based planning
Journal
36
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1552-3098
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
20
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anthony Francis1163.70
Aleksandra Faust26814.83
Hao-Tien Lewis Chiang3164.71
Jasmine Hsu4153.39
J. Chase Kew510.37
Marek Fiser6293.66
Tsang-Wei Edward Lee762.15