Physics-informed Neural Mapping and Motion Planning in Unknown Environments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Yuchen, Ni, Ruiqi, Qureshi, Ahmed H.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Liu, Yuchen
Ni, Ruiqi
Qureshi, Ahmed H.
author_facet Liu, Yuchen
Ni, Ruiqi
Qureshi, Ahmed H.
contents Mapping and motion planning are two essential elements of robot intelligence that are interdependent in generating environment maps and navigating around obstacles. The existing mapping methods create maps that require computationally expensive motion planning tools to find a path solution. In this paper, we propose a new mapping feature called arrival time fields, which is a solution to the Eikonal equation. The arrival time fields can directly guide the robot in navigating the given environments. Therefore, this paper introduces a new approach called Active Neural Time Fields (Active NTFields), which is a physics-informed neural framework that actively explores the unknown environment and maps its arrival time field on the fly for robot motion planning. Our method does not require any expert data for learning and uses neural networks to directly solve the Eikonal equation for arrival time field mapping and motion planning. We benchmark our approach against state-of-the-art mapping and motion planning methods and demonstrate its superior performance in both simulated and real-world environments with a differential drive robot and a 6 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) robot manipulator. The supplementary videos can be found at https://youtu.be/qTPL5a6pRKk, and the implementation code repository is available at https://github.com/Rtlyc/antfields-demo.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_09883
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Physics-informed Neural Mapping and Motion Planning in Unknown Environments
Liu, Yuchen
Ni, Ruiqi
Qureshi, Ahmed H.
Robotics
Mapping and motion planning are two essential elements of robot intelligence that are interdependent in generating environment maps and navigating around obstacles. The existing mapping methods create maps that require computationally expensive motion planning tools to find a path solution. In this paper, we propose a new mapping feature called arrival time fields, which is a solution to the Eikonal equation. The arrival time fields can directly guide the robot in navigating the given environments. Therefore, this paper introduces a new approach called Active Neural Time Fields (Active NTFields), which is a physics-informed neural framework that actively explores the unknown environment and maps its arrival time field on the fly for robot motion planning. Our method does not require any expert data for learning and uses neural networks to directly solve the Eikonal equation for arrival time field mapping and motion planning. We benchmark our approach against state-of-the-art mapping and motion planning methods and demonstrate its superior performance in both simulated and real-world environments with a differential drive robot and a 6 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) robot manipulator. The supplementary videos can be found at https://youtu.be/qTPL5a6pRKk, and the implementation code repository is available at https://github.com/Rtlyc/antfields-demo.
title Physics-informed Neural Mapping and Motion Planning in Unknown Environments
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09883