ScottyActivity: Mixed Discrete-Continuous Planning with Convex Optimization
Name
ScottyActivity_JAIR_FernandezKarpasWilliams_2018_preprint.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
1.36 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7e614a8e3c94b62b1dfa3e95383f8fd8
Author(s)
Fernandez Gonzalez, Enrique
Williams, Brian C
Karpas, Erez
Date Issued
July 27, 2018
Journal
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Publisher
AI Access Foundation
Citation
Fernandez-Gonzales, Enrique et al. "ScottyActivity: Mixed Discrete-Continuous Planning with Convex Optimization." Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 62, (July 2018): p.579-664 © 2018 AI Access Foundation
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
The state of the art practice in robotics planning is to script behaviors manually, where each behavior is typically generated using trajectory optimization. However, in order for robots to be able to act robustly and adapt to novel situations, they need to plan these activity sequences autonomously. Since the conditions and effects of these behaviors are tightly coupled through time, state and control variables, many problems require that the tasks of activity planning and trajectory optimization are considered together. There are two key issues underlying effective hybrid activity and trajectory planning: the sufficiently accurate modeling of robot dynamics and the capability of planning over long horizons. Hybrid activity and trajectory planners that employ mixed integer programming within a discrete time formulation are able to accurately model complex dynamics for robot vehicles, but are often restricted to relatively short horizons. On the other hand, current hybrid activity planners that employ continuous time formulations can handle longer horizons but they only allow actions to have continuous effects with constant rate of change, and restrict the allowed state constraints to linear inequalities. This is insufficient for many robotic applications and it greatly limits the expressivity of the problems that these approaches can solve. In this work we present the ScottyActivity planner, that is able to generate practical hybrid activity and motion plans over long horizons by employing recent methods in convex optimization combined with methods for planning with relaxed plan graphs and heuristic forward search. Unlike other continuous time planners, ScottyActivity can solve a broad class of robotic planning problems by supporting convex quadratic constraints on state variables and control variables that are jointly constrained and that affect multiple state variables simultaneously. In order to support planning over long horizons, ScottyActivity does not resort to time, state or control variable discretization. While straightforward formulations of consistency checks are not convex and do not scale, we present an efficient convex formulation, in the form of a Second Order Cone Program (SOCP), that is very fast to solve. We also introduce several new realistic domains that demonstrate the capabilities and scalability of our approach, and their simplified linear versions, that we use to compare with other state of the art planners. This work demonstrates the power of integrating advanced convex optimization techniques with discrete search methods and paves the way for extensions dealing with non-convex disjoint constraints, such as obstacle avoidance.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.1.11219
