Pushing the Limits of Reactive Planning: Learning to Escape Local Minima
<|reference_start|>Pushing the Limits of Reactive Planning: Learning to Escape Local Minima: When does a robot planner need a map? Reactive methods that use only the robot's current sensor data and local information are fast and flexible, but prone to getting stuck in local minima. Is there a middle-ground between fully reactive methods and map-based path planners? In this paper, we investigate feed forward and recurrent networks to augment a purely reactive sensor-based planner, which should give the robot geometric intuition about how to escape local minima. We train on a large number of extremely cluttered worlds auto-generated from primitive shapes, and show that our system zero-shot transfers to real 3D man-made environments, and can handle up to 30% sensor noise without degeneration of performance. We also offer a discussion of what role network memory plays in our final system, and what insights can be drawn about the nature of reactive vs. map-based navigation.<|reference_end|>
@article{meijer2024pushing,
    title={Pushing the Limits of Reactive Planning: Learning to Escape Local Minima},
    author={Isar Meijer, Michael Pantic, Helen Oleynikova, Roland Siegwart},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.13530},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2407.13530},
    primaryClass={cs.RO}
}