Clustering-Based Robot Navigation and Control

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Degree type
Graduate group
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Subject
GRASP
Kodlab
Motion planning
Robot control
Clustering
Configuration spaces
Sampling-based motion planning
Geometry
Topology
Voronoi Diagrams
Hierarchical Clustering
Collision Avoidance
Local free space
Controls and Control Theory
Control Theory
Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics
Dynamic Systems
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Engineering
Geometry and Topology
Non-linear Dynamics
Robotics
Systems Engineering
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This work was supported in part by AFOSR under the CHASE MURI FA9550–10–1−0567.
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Abstract

In robotics, it is essential to model and understand the topologies of configuration spaces in order to design provably correct motion planners. The common practice in motion planning for modelling configuration spaces requires either a global, explicit representation of a configuration space in terms of standard geometric and topological models, or an asymptotically dense collection of sample configurations connected by simple paths, capturing the connectivity of the underlying space. This dissertation introduces the use of clustering for closing the gap between these two complementary approaches. Traditionally an unsupervised learning method, clustering offers automated tools to discover hidden intrinsic structures in generally complex-shaped and high-dimensional configuration spaces of robotic systems. We demonstrate some potential applications of such clustering tools to the problem of feedback motion planning and control. The first part of the dissertation presents the use of hierarchical clustering for relaxed, deterministic coordination and control of multiple robots. We reinterpret this classical method for unsupervised learning as an abstract formalism for identifying and representing spatially cohesive and segregated robot groups at different resolutions, by relating the continuous space of configurations to the combinatorial space of trees. Based on this new abstraction and a careful topological characterization of the associated hierarchical structure, a provably correct, computationally efficient hierarchical navigation framework is proposed for collision-free coordinated motion design towards a designated multirobot configuration via a sequence of hierarchy-preserving local controllers. The second part of the dissertation introduces a new, robot-centric application of Voronoi diagrams to identify a collision-free neighborhood of a robot configuration that captures the local geometric structure of a configuration space around the robot’s instantaneous position. Based on robot-centric Voronoi diagrams, a provably correct, collision-free coverage and congestion control algorithm is proposed for distributed mobile sensing applications of heterogeneous disk-shaped robots; and a sensor-based reactive navigation algorithm is proposed for exact navigation of a disk-shaped robot in forest-like cluttered environments. These results strongly suggest that clustering is, indeed, an effective approach for automatically extracting intrinsic structures in configuration spaces and that it might play a key role in the design of computationally efficient, provably correct motion planners in complex, high-dimensional configuration spaces.

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2016-08-01
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@PhdThesis{arslan_PhdThesis2016, Title = {Clustering-Based Robot Navigation and Control}, Author = {Omur Arslan}, School = {University of Pennsylvania}, Year = {2016}, Month = {August} }