Waypoint Planning Networks
Abstract
With the recent advances in machine learning, path planning algorithms are also evolving; however, the learned path planning algorithms often have difficulty competing with success rates of classic algorithms. We propose waypoint planning networks (WPN), a hybrid algorithm based on LSTMs with a local kernel - a classic algorithm such as A*, and a global kernel using a learned algorithm. WPN produces a more computationally efficient and robust solution. We compare WPN against A*, as well as related works including motion planning networks (MPNet) and value iteration networks (VIN). In this paper, the design and experiments have been conducted for 2D environments. Experimental results outline the benefits of WPN, both in efficiency and generalization. It is shown that WPN's search space is considerably less than A*, while being able to generate near optimal results. Additionally, WPN works on partial maps, unlike A* which needs the full map in advance. The code is available online.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2105.00312,
title = {Waypoint Planning Networks},
author = {Alexandru-Iosif Toma and Hussein Ali Jaafar and Hao-Ya Hsueh and Stephen James and Daniel Lenton and Ronald Clark and Sajad Saeedi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.00312},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
The Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV2021) Supplementary Website: https://sites.google.com/view/waypoint-planning-networks