The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

A popular approach to high dimensional control problems in robotics uses a library of candidate ``maneuvers" or ``trajectories". The library is either evaluated on a fixed number of candidate choices at runtime (e.g. path set selection for planning) or by iterating through a sequence of feasible choices until success is achieved (e.g. grasp selection). The performance of the library relies heavily on the content and order of the sequence of candidates. We propose a provably efficient method to optimize such libraries leveraging recent advances in optimizing sub-modular functions of sequences. This approach is demonstrated on two important problems: mobile robot navigation and manipulator grasp set selection. In the first case, performance can be improved by choosing a subset of candidates which optimizes the metric under consideration (cost of traversal). In the second case, performance can be optimized by minimizing the depth the list is searched before a successful candidate is found. Our method can be used in both on-line and batch settings with provable performance guarantees, and can be run in an anytime manner to handle real-time constraints.

Keywords

Control Libraries, submodular, online, optimization, path planning, manipulation, grasp, trajectories

Notes

Sponsor: Army Research Laboratories through R-CTA and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency through ARM-D

Text Reference

Debadeepta Dey, Tommy Liu, Boris Sofman, and J. Andrew (Drew) Bagnell, "Efficient Optimization of Control Libraries," tech. report CMU-RI-TR-11-20, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, June, 2011

BibTeX Reference

@techreport{Dey_2011_6873,
   author = "Debadeepta Dey and Tian Yu Liu and Boris Sofman and J. Andrew (Drew) Bagnell",
   title = "Efficient Optimization of Control Libraries",
   booktitle = "",
   institution = "Robotics Institute",
   month = "June",
   year = "2011",
   number= "CMU-RI-TR-11-20",
   address= "Pittsburgh, PA",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu