Kislay Kumar

Naman Shah, Deepak Kala Vasudevan, Kislay Kumar et al.

In order to solve complex, long-horizon tasks, intelligent robots need to carry out high-level, abstract planning and reasoning in conjunction with motion planning. However, abstract models are typically lossy and plans or policies computed using them can be unexecutable. These problems are exacerbated in stochastic situations where the robot needs to reason about, and plan for multiple contingencies. We present a new approach for integrated task and motion planning in stochastic settings. In contrast to prior work in this direction, we show that our approach can effectively compute integrated task and motion policies whose branching structures encoding agent behaviors handling multiple execution-time contingencies. We prove that our algorithm is probabilistically complete and can compute feasible solution policies in an anytime fashion so that the probability of encountering an unresolved contingency decreases over time. Empirical results on a set of challenging problems show the utility and scope of our methods.

Daniel Molina, Kislay Kumar, Siddharth Srivastava

This paper presents a new approach to learning for motion planning (MP) where critical regions of an environment are learned from a given set of motion plans and used to improve performance on new environments and problem instances. We introduce a new suite of sampling-based motion planners, Learn and Link. Our planners leverage critical regions to overcome the limitations of uniform sampling, while still maintaining guarantees of correctness inherent to sampling-based algorithms. We also show that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be used to identify critical regions for motion planning problems. We evaluate Learn and Link against planners from the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) using an extensive suite of experiments on challenging motion planning problems. We show that our approach requires far less planning time than existing sampling-based planners.