29 accepted papers
This article discusses the integration challenges and strategies for designing mobile robots, by focusing on the task-driven, optimal selection of hardware and software to balance safety, efficiency, and minimal usage of resources such as costs, energy, computational requirements, and weight. We emp
We consider the interaction among agents engaging in a driving task and we model it as general-sum game. This class of games exhibits a plurality of different equilibria posing the issue of equilibrium selection. While selecting the most efficient equilibrium (in term of social cost) is often imprac
One of the major challenges that autonomous vehicles (AVs) face in an urban setting is communicating with other road users such as pedestrians. In this work, we investigated with what expressive behaviors we can endow AVs such that pedestrians readily recognize the underlying intent of the vehicles’
In recent years, driving context perception has emerged as one of the key aspects to design driving assistance algorithms and user interfaces that are effective in adapting to different traffic situations or environments. To this aim, we introduce the Anonymous Driving Scene Perception (ADSP) Model,…
Dynamic games feature a state-space complexity that scales superlinearly with the number of players. This makes this class of games often intractable even for a handful of players. We introduce the factorization process of dynamic games as a transformation leveraging the independence of players at e…
Modern applications require robots to comply with multiple, often conflicting rules and to interact with the other agents. We present Posetal Games as a class of games in which each player expresses a preference over the outcomes via a partially ordered set of metrics. This allows one to combine hie
We consider the problem of co-designing embodied intelligence as a whole in a structured way, from hardware components such as propulsion systems and sensors to software modules such as control and perception pipelines. We propose a principled approach to formulate and solve complex embodied intelli…
In recent years, mobility on demand has experienced a major revival due to various ride-hailing companies entering the market. Competing in this field requires an efficient operation. Therefore, the applied policy, which cares for vehicle-to-customer assignment and vehicle repositioning, has to achi…
Plastic neural networks have the ability to adapt to new tasks. However, in a continual learning setting, the configuration of parameters learned in previous tasks can severely reduce the adaptability to future tasks. In particular, we show that, when using weight decay, weights in successive layers…
We describe Urban Driving Games (UDGs) as a particular class of differential games that model the interactions and incentives of the urban driving task. The drivers possess a “communal” interest, such as not colliding with each other, but are also self-interested in fulfilling traffic rules and pers
As robotics matures and increases in complexity, it is more necessary than ever that robot autonomy research be reproducible. Compared to other sciences, there are specific challenges to benchmarking autonomy, such as the complexity of the software stacks, the variability of the hardware and the rel…
RRT* is one of the most widely used sampling-based algorithms for asymptotically-optimal motion planning. RRT* laid the foundations for optimality in motion planning as a whole, and inspired the development of numerous new algorithms in the field, many of which build upon RRT* itself. In this paper,…
Robots that need to act in an uncertain, populated, and varied world need heterogeneous sensors to be able to perceive and act robustly. For example, self-driving cars currently on the road are equipped with dozens of sensors of several types (lidar, radar, sonar, cameras, ...). All of this existing…
The behavior of self-driving cars must be compatible with an enormous set of conflicting and ambiguous objectives, from law, from ethics, from the local culture, and so on. This paper describes a new way to conveniently define the desired behavior for autonomous agents, which we use on the self-driv…
This paper presents a model predictive control (MPC) approach to optimize routes for Ride-sharing Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (RAMoD) systems, whereby self-driving vehicles provide coordinated on-demand mobility, possibly allowing multiple customers to share a ride. Specifically, we first devise a…
One of the challenges of developing autonomous vehicles is planning in an inhabited environment under sensing uncertainty as well as limited perception and computational resources. Besides reasoning about the behaviour of traffic participants that are within the vehicles' field of view, safe autonom…
Typically, to enlarge the operating domain of an object detector, more labeled training data is required. We describe a method called wormhole learning, which allows to extend the operating domain without additional data, but only with temporary access to an auxiliary sensor with certain invariance…
Duckietown is an open, inexpensive and flexible platform for autonomy education and research. The platform comprises small autonomous vehicles (“Duckiebots”) built from off-the-shelf components, and cities (“Duckietowns”) complete with roads, signage, traffic lights, obstacles, and citizens (duckies…
A landmark based heuristic is investigated for reducing query phase run-time of the probabilistic roadmap (PRM) motion planning method. The heuristic is generated by storing minimum spanning trees from a small number of vertices within the PRM graph and using these trees to approximate the cost of a…
This paper presents a new method for motion planning under differential constraints by incorporating a numerically solved discretized representation of reachable state space for faster state sampling and nearest neighbor searching. The reachable state space is solved for offline and stored into a “r
Constraint on the actuation and power resources is often the critical limiting factor for a robot to perform desired tasks. Increasing torque and energy capacity may be a solution, but is seldom viable for robots already built. An attractive alternative is to carefully generate motion trajectories t…
How does one obtain an admissible heuristic for a kinodynamic motion planning problem? This letter develops the analytical tools and techniques to answer this question. A sufficient condition for the admissibility of a heuristic is presented, which can be checked directly from problem data. This con
In this work, we address the problem of robust data association for feature cloud matching. For matching two feature clouds observed at two different poses, we discover that the covariance matrix of the measurement prediction error can be written as the sum of a low rank matrix and a block diagonal…
The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) provides a principled general model for planning under uncertainty. However, solving a general POMDP is computationally intractable in the worst case. This paper introduces POMDP-lite, a subclass of POMDPs in which the hidden state variables a
One of the standing challenges in multi-robot systems is the ability to reliably coordinate motions of multiple robots in environments where the robots are subject to disturbances. We consider disturbances that force the robot to temporarily stop and delay its advancement along its planned trajector…
There is considerable freedom in choosing the sensors to be equipped on a robot. Currently many sensing technologies are available (radar, lidar, vision sensors, time-of-flight cameras, etc.). For each class, there are additional choices regarding the exact sensor parameters (spatial resolution, fra…
We detail the design of autonomous golf cars which were used in public trials in Singapore's Chinese and Japanese Gardens, for the purpose of raising public awareness and gaining user acceptance of autonomous vehicles. The golf cars were designed to be robust, reliable, and safe, while operating und…
The RRT* algorithm has efficiently extended Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs) to endow it with asymptotic optimality. We propose Goal-Rooted Feedback Motion Trees (GR-FMTs) that honor state/input constraints and generate collision-free feedback policies. Given analytic solutions for optimal loca…
In a mixed environment of autonomous driverless vehicles and human driven vehicles operating on the same road, identifying intentions of human drivers and interacting with them in a compliant and responsible manner becomes a challenging problem for the driverless vehicles. In this paper, the problem…