2024/07/18 by Isar Meijer, Michael Pantic, Meijer, Isar +5
Computer Science · Psychology · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Innovative Teaching and Learning Methods #Robotics (cs.RO) #Teaching and Learning Programming
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.13530
openalex publication_date 2024/07/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
When does a robot planner need a map? Reactive methods that use only the robot's current sensor data and local information are fast and flexible, but prone to getting stuck in local minima. Is there a middle-ground between fully reactive methods and map-based path planners? In this paper, we investigate feed forward and recurrent networks to augment a purely reactive sensor-based planner, which should give the robot geometric intuition about how to escape local minima. We train on a large number of extremely cluttered worlds auto-generated from primitive shapes, and show that our system zero-shot transfers to real 3D man-made environments, and can handle up to 30% sensor noise without degeneration of performance. We also offer a discussion of what role network memory plays in our final system, and what insights can be drawn about the nature of reactive vs. map-based navigation.