Related papers: Active Markov Information-Theoretic Path Planning …
Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…
Planning plays an important role in the broad class of decision theory. Planning has drawn much attention in recent work in the robotics and sequential decision making areas. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL), as an agent-environment…
This study presents a new methodology for learning-based motion planning for autonomous exploration using aerial robots. Through the reinforcement learning method of learning through trial and error, the action policy is derived that can…
Many robotic exploration algorithms rely on graph structures for frontier-based exploration and dynamic path planning. However, these graphs grow rapidly, accumulating redundant information and impacting performance. We present a…
Motion planning is a fundamental problem in autonomous robotics that requires finding a path to a specified goal that avoids obstacles and takes into account a robot's limitations and constraints. It is often desirable for this path to also…
The present work deals with active sampling of graph nodes representing training data for binary classification. The graph may be given or constructed using similarity measures among nodal features. Leveraging the graph for classification…
Consider $n$ random variables forming a Markov random field (MRF). The true model of the MRF is unknown, and it is assumed to belong to a binary set. The objective is to sequentially sample the random variables (one-at-a-time) such that the…
We introduce a new framework for efficient sampling from complex probability distributions, using a combination of optimal transport maps and the Metropolis-Hastings rule. The core idea is to use continuous transportation to transform…
Platooning connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) provide significant benefits in terms of traffic efficiency and fuel economy. However, most existing platooning systems assume the availability of pre-determined plans, which is not…
Sampling-based planners are effective in many real-world applications such as robotics manipulation, navigation, and even protein modeling. However, it is often challenging to generate a collision-free path in environments where key areas…
In many real-world applications (e.g., planetary exploration, robot navigation), an autonomous agent must be able to explore a space with guaranteed safety. Most safe exploration algorithms in the field of reinforcement learning and…
We consider a problem called task ordering with path uncertainty (TOP-U) where multiple robots are provided with a set of task locations to visit in a bounded environment, but the length of the path between a pair of task locations is…
Robots with increasing autonomy progress our space exploration capabilities, particularly for in-situ exploration and sampling to stand in for human explorers. Currently, humans drive robots to meet scientific objectives, but depending on…
Sample-efficient exploration is crucial not only for discovering rewarding experiences but also for adapting to environment changes in a task-agnostic fashion. A principled treatment of the problem of optimal input synthesis for system…
We present an information theoretic approach to stochastic optimal control problems that can be used to derive general sampling based optimization schemes. This new mathematical method is used to develop a sampling based model predictive…
Path planning is a crucial algorithmic approach for designing robot behaviors. Sampling-based approaches, like rapidly exploring random trees (RRTs) or probabilistic roadmaps, are prominent algorithmic solutions for path planning problems.…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a popular class of models suitable for solving control decision problems in probabilistic reactive systems. We consider parametric MDPs (pMDPs) that include parameters in some of the transition…
Gaussian process (GP) regression provides a strategy for accelerating saddle point searches on high-dimensional energy surfaces by reducing the number of times the energy and its derivatives with respect to atomic coordinates need to be…
We address the problem where a mobile search agent seeks to find an unknown number of stationary objects distributed in a bounded search domain, and the search mission is subject to time/distance constraint. Our work accounts for false…
We present a novel probabilistic approach for optimal path experimental design. In this approach a discrete path optimization problem is defined on a static navigation mesh, and trajectories are modeled as random variables governed by a…