Towards Learning Efficient Maneuver Sets for Kinodynamic Motion Planning

Planning for systems with dynamics is challenging as often there is no local planner available and the only primitive to explore the state space is forward propagation of controls. In this context, tree sampling-based planners have been developed, some of which achieve asymptotic optimality by propagating random controls during each iteration. While desirable for the analysis, random controls result in slow convergence to high quality trajectories in practice. This short position statement first argues that if a kinodynamic planner has access to local maneuvers that appropriately balance an exploitation-exploration trade-off, the planner's per iteration performance is significantly improved. Generating such maneuvers during planning can be achieved by curating a large sample of random controls. This is, however, computationally very expensive. If such maneuvers can be generated fast, the planner's performance will also improve as a function of computation time. Towards objective, this short position statement argues for the integration of modern machine learning frameworks with state-of-the-art, informed and asymptotically optimal kinodynamic planners. The proposed approach involves using using neural networks to infer local maneuvers for a robotic system with dynamics, which properly balance the above exploitation-exploration trade-off. In particular, a neural network architecture is proposed, which is trained to reflect the choices of an online curation process, given local obstacle and heuristic information. The planner uses these maneuvers to efficiently explore the underlying state space, while still maintaining desirable properties. Preliminary indications in simulated environments and systems are promising but also point to certain challenges that motivate further research in this direction.