2024/03/17 by Matt Schmittle, Schmittle, Matt, Rohan Baijal +7 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Robotic Path Planning Algorithms #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.11298
openalex publication_date 2024/03/17 · openalex created_date 2024/03/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We focus on the problem of long-range dynamic replanning for off-road autonomous vehicles, where a robot plans paths through a previously unobserved environment while continuously receiving noisy local observations. An effective approach for planning under sensing uncertainty is determinization, where one converts a stochastic world into a deterministic one and plans under this simplification. This makes the planning problem tractable, but the cost of following the planned path in the real world may be different than in the determinized world. This causes collisions if the determinized world optimistically ignores obstacles, or causes unnecessarily long routes if the determinized world pessimistically imagines more obstacles. We aim to be robust to uncertainty over potential worlds while still achieving the efficiency benefits of determinization. We evaluate algorithms for dynamic replanning on a large real-world dataset of challenging long-range planning problems from the DARPA RACER program. Our method, Dynamic Replanning via Evaluating and Aggregating Multiple Samples (DREAMS), outperforms other determinization-based approaches in terms of combined traversal time and collision cost. https://sites.google.com/cs.washington.edu/dreams/