End-to-end Sketch-Guided Path Planning through Imitation Learning for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Path planning is crucial for Autonomous Mobile Robots applications. Traditionally, path planning based on human input and preferences has relied on hard to define reward-based learning or costly techniques requiring additional hardware. This work introduces a more accessible and flexible approach through sketch-guided imitation learning, where nontechnical users can simply draw the desired navigational path on a provided 2D map, which is then used to teach U-net models path planning behaviors. Additionally, the work draws on metrics from the fields of image generation and robotics to provide a novel evaluation framework. The approach is integrated into an end-to-end robotics stack to demonstrate its usability. The dataset and code are provided on https://github.com/charbel-a-hC/SKIPP.