Sampling-Based Path Planning and Semantic Navigation for Complex Large-Scale Environments

This article proposes a multi-agent path planning and decision-making solution for high-tempo field robotic operations, such as search-and-rescue, in large-scale unstructured environments. As a representative example, the subterranean environments can span many kilometers and are loaded with challenges such as limited to no communication, hazardous terrain, blocked passages due to collapses, and vertical structures. The time-sensitive nature of these operations inherently requires solutions that are reliably deployable in practice. Moreover, a human-supervised multi-robot team is required to ensure that mobility and cognitive capabilities of various agents are leveraged for efficiency of the mission. Therefore, this article attempts to propose a solution that is suited for both air and ground vehicles and is adapted well for information sharing between different agents. This article first details a sampling-based autonomous exploration solution that brings significant improvements with respect to the current state of the art. These improvements include relying on an occupancy grid-based sample-and-project solution to terrain assessment and formulating the solution-search problem as a constraint-satisfaction problem to further enhance the computational efficiency of the planner. In addition, the demonstration of the exploration planner by team MARBLE at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge finals is presented. The inevitable interaction of heterogeneous autonomous robots with human operators demands the use of common semantics for reasoning across the robot and human teams making use of different geometric map capabilities suited for their mobility and computational resources. To this end, the path planner is further extended to include semantic mapping and decision-making into the framework. Firstly, the proposed solution generates a semantic map of the exploration environment by labeling position history of a robot in the form of probability distributions of observations. The semantic reasoning solution uses higher-level cues from a semantic map in order to bias exploration behaviors toward a semantic of interest. This objective is achieved by using a particle filter to localize a robot on a given semantic map followed by a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP)-based controller to guide the exploration direction of the sampling-based exploration planner. Hence, this article aims to bridge an understanding gap between human and a heterogeneous robotic team not just through a common-sense semantic map transfer among the agents but by also enabling a robot to make use of such information to guide its lower-level reasoning in case such abstract information is transferred to it.