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Experience Learning From Basic Patterns for Efficient Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments

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Abstract

In this paper we propose a machine learning technique for real-time robot path planning for an autonomous robot in a planar environment with obstacles where the robot possess no a priori map of its environment. Our main insight in this paper is that a robot’s path planning times can be significantly reduced if it can refer to previous maneuvers it used to avoid obstacles during earlier missions, and adapt that information to avoid obstacles during its current navigation. We propose an online path planning algorithm called LearnerRRT that utilizes a pattern matching technique called Sample Consensus Initial Alignment (SAC-IA) in combination with an experience-based learning technique to adapt obstacle boundary patterns encountered in previous environments to the current scenario followed by corresponding adaptations in the obstacle-avoidance paths. Our proposed algorithm LearnerRRT works as a learning-based reactive path planning technique which enables robots to improve their overall path planning performance by locally improving maneuvers around commonly encountered obstacle patterns by accessing previously accumulated environmental information. We have conducted several experiments in simulations and hardware to verify the performance of the LearnerRRT algorithm and compared it with a state-of-the-art sampling-based planner. LearnerRRT on average takes approximately 10% of the planning time and 14% of the total time taken by the sampling-based planner to solve the same navigation task based on simulation results and takes only 33% of the planning time, 46% of total time and 95% of total distance compared to the sampling-based planner based on our hardware results.

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  1. Computer Science Department, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, USA

    Olimpiya Saha & Prithviraj Dasgupta

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  1. Olimpiya Saha
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  2. Prithviraj Dasgupta
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Correspondence to Olimpiya Saha.

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Saha, O., Dasgupta, P. Experience Learning From Basic Patterns for Efficient Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments. J Intell Robot Syst 92, 545–564 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-017-0739-7

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