Abstract
Lydia Tapia, Shawna Thomas, Bryan Boyd, Nancy M. Amato, "An Unsupervised Adaptive Strategy for Constructing Probabilistic Roadmaps," Technical Report, TR08-004, Parasol Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, U.S.A., Sep 2008.
Technical Report(ps, pdf, abstract)
Since planning environments are complex and no single planner
exists that is best for all problems, much work has been done to
explore methods for selecting where and when to apply particular planners.
However, these two questions have been difficult to answer, even
when adaptive methods meant to facilitate a solution are applied.
For example, adaptive solutions such as setting learning rates,
hand-classifying spaces, and defining parameters for a library of
planners have all been proposed.
We demonstrate a strategy based on unsupervised learning
methods that makes adaptive planning more practical.
The unsupervised strategies
require less user intervention, model the topology of the problem in
a reasonable and efficient manner, can adapt the sampler depending on
characteristics of the problem, and can easily accept new samplers as
they become available.
Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate
that in a wide variety of environments, the regions automatically identified
by our technique represent the planning space well both in number and placement.
We also show that our technique has little overhead and that it
out-performs two existing adaptive
methods in all complex cases studied.