Avoidance Critical Probabilistic Roadmaps for Motion Planning in Dynamic Environments

Motion planning among dynamic obstacles is an essential capability towards navigation in the real-world. Sampling-based motion planning algorithms find solutions by approximating the robot's configuration space through a graph representation, predicting or computing obstacles' trajectories, and finding feasible paths via a pathfinding algorithm. In this work, we seek to improve the performance of these subproblems by identifying regions critical to dynamic environment navigation and leveraging them to construct sparse probabilistic roadmaps. Motion planning and pathfinding algorithms should allow robots to prevent encounters with obstacles, irrespective of their trajectories, by being conscious of spatial context cues such as the location of chokepoints (e.g., doorways). Thus, we propose a self-supervised methodology for learning to identify regions frequently used for obstacle avoidance from local environment features. As an application of this concept, we leverage a neural network to generate hierarchical probabilistic roadmaps termed Avoidance Critical Probabilistic Roadmaps (ACPRM). These roadmaps contain motion structures that enable efficient obstacle avoidance, reduce the search and planning space, and increase a roadmap's reusability and coverage. ACPRMs are demonstrated to achieve up to five orders of magnitude improvement over grid-sampling in the multi-agent setting and up to ten orders of magnitude over a competitive baseline in the multi-query setting.