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Main Authors: Fuentes, Erick, Strader, Jared, Fahnestock, Ethan, Roy, Nicholas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17982
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author Fuentes, Erick
Strader, Jared
Fahnestock, Ethan
Roy, Nicholas
author_facet Fuentes, Erick
Strader, Jared
Fahnestock, Ethan
Roy, Nicholas
contents We would like a robot to navigate to a goal location while minimizing state uncertainty. To aid the robot in this endeavor, maps provide a prior belief over the location of objects and regions of interest. To localize itself within the map, a robot identifies mapped landmarks using its sensors. However, as the time between map creation and robot deployment increases, portions of the map can become stale, and landmarks, once believed to be permanent, may disappear. We refer to the propensity of a landmark to disappear as landmark evanescence. Reasoning about landmark evanescence during path planning, and the associated impact on localization accuracy, requires analyzing the presence or absence of each landmark, leading to an exponential number of possible outcomes of a given motion plan. To address this complexity, we develop BRULE, an extension of the Belief Roadmap. During planning, we replace the belief over future robot poses with a Gaussian mixture which is able to capture the effects of landmark evanescence. Furthermore, we show that belief updates can be made efficient, and that maintaining a random subset of mixture components is sufficient to find high quality solutions. We demonstrate performance in simulated and real-world experiments. Software is available at https://bit.ly/BRULE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_17982
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Belief Roadmaps with Uncertain Landmark Evanescence
Fuentes, Erick
Strader, Jared
Fahnestock, Ethan
Roy, Nicholas
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
We would like a robot to navigate to a goal location while minimizing state uncertainty. To aid the robot in this endeavor, maps provide a prior belief over the location of objects and regions of interest. To localize itself within the map, a robot identifies mapped landmarks using its sensors. However, as the time between map creation and robot deployment increases, portions of the map can become stale, and landmarks, once believed to be permanent, may disappear. We refer to the propensity of a landmark to disappear as landmark evanescence. Reasoning about landmark evanescence during path planning, and the associated impact on localization accuracy, requires analyzing the presence or absence of each landmark, leading to an exponential number of possible outcomes of a given motion plan. To address this complexity, we develop BRULE, an extension of the Belief Roadmap. During planning, we replace the belief over future robot poses with a Gaussian mixture which is able to capture the effects of landmark evanescence. Furthermore, we show that belief updates can be made efficient, and that maintaining a random subset of mixture components is sufficient to find high quality solutions. We demonstrate performance in simulated and real-world experiments. Software is available at https://bit.ly/BRULE.
title Belief Roadmaps with Uncertain Landmark Evanescence
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17982