Behrouz Haji Soleimani Dr. Moradi
Jan 01, 2016
OutlineWhat is uncertainty?Some examplesSolutions to uncertainty
Ignoring uncertaintyMarkov Decision Process (MDP)Stochastic Motion Roadmap
A detailed exampleConclusion
What is uncertainty?Uncertainty in sensing
the current state of the robot and workspace is not known with certainty
Predictability
the future state of the robot and workspace cannot be deterministically predicted even when the current state and future actions are known
PredictabilityUncertainty in workspace
Uncertainty in goal locationDynamic environments with moving obstacles
Uncertainty in robot’s motion
Uncertainty exampleA robot with imperfect sensing must reach a
goal location among moving obstacles (dynamic world)
Uncertainty exampleRobot created at Stanford’s ARL Lab to study
issues in robot control and planning in no-gravity space environment
air thrusters gas tank
air bearing
Markov Decision Process (MDP)MDP is a general approach to considering
uncertaintyDetermines model of the environmentDescretizes state spaceRequires explicitly defining transition
probabilities between statesWe can use dynamic programming to solve
the MDP
Stochastic Motion RoadmapCombines a roadmap representation of
configuration space with the theory of MDP’sMaximizes the probability of successUses sampling to
learn the configuration space (represented as states)
learn the stochastic motion model (represented as state transition probabilities)
Discretizes state spaceDiscretizes actions
Stochastic Motion RoadmapLearning Phase
Selecting random sample of discrete statesSample the robot’s motion model to build a
Stochastic Motion Roadmap (SMR)Calculating transition probabilities for each
actionQuery Phase
Specify initial and goal statesRoadmap is used to find a feasible pathPossibly optimizing some criteria such as
minimum length
Maximizing probability of successbuild an n × n transition probability matrix
P(u) for each u UFor each tuple (s, t, p) , we set
equals the probability of transitioning from state s to state t given that action u is performed
uE puPst )(
Maximizing probability of successIt is an MDP and has the form of the Bellman
equation
Where and
It can be optimally solved using infinite horizon dynamic programming
ConclusionUncertainty has a great effect on successfully
reaching the goalMDP can consider uncertainty in the modelSMR combines PRM and MDP to handle
uncertaintySMR maximizes the probability of successSMR makes balance between path safety and
minimum lengthContinuous actions in SMR is still an open
question
References [1] R. Alterovitz, T. Simeon, and K. Goldberg, “The Stochastic
Motion Roadmap: A Sampling Framework for Planning with Markov Motion Uncertainty” 2007
[2] R. Alterovitz, M. Branicky, and K. Goldberg, “Constant-curvature motion planning under uncertainty with applications in image-guided medical needle steering,” in Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, July 2006.
[3] R. Alterovitz, A. Lim, K. Goldberg, G. S. Chirikjian, and A. M. Okamura, “Steering flexible needles under Markov motion uncertainty,” in Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Aug. 2005, pp. 120–125.
[4] B. Bouilly, T. Simeon, and R. Alami, “A numerical technique for planning motion strategies of a mobile robot in presence of uncertainty,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Nagoya, Japan, May 1995.