P. B. Sujit

Kasi Vishwanath, P. B. Sujit, Srikanth Saripalli

Cost-maps are used by robotic vehicles to plan collision-free paths. The cost associated with each cell in the map represents the sensed environment information which is often determined manually after several trial-and-error efforts. In off-road environments, due to the presence of several types of features, it is challenging to handcraft the cost values associated with each feature. Moreover, different handcrafted cost values can lead to different paths for the same environment which is not desirable. In this paper, we address the problem of learning the cost-map values from the sensed environment for robust vehicle path planning. We propose a novel framework called as CAMEL using deep learning approach that learns the parameters through demonstrations yielding an adaptive and robust cost-map for path planning. CAMEL has been trained on multi-modal datasets such as RELLIS-3D. The evaluation of CAMEL is carried out on an off-road scene simulator (MAVS) and on field data from IISER-B campus. We also perform realworld implementation of CAMEL on a ground rover. The results shows flexible and robust motion of the vehicle without collisions in unstructured terrains.

Jayabrata Chowdhury, Venkataramanan Shivaraman, Sumit Dangi et al.

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) decision making in urban environments is inherently challenging due to the dynamic interactions with surrounding vehicles. For safe planning, AV must understand the weightage of various spatiotemporal interactions in a scene. Contemporary works use colossal transformer architectures to encode interactions mainly for trajectory prediction, resulting in increased computational complexity. To address this issue without compromising spatiotemporal understanding and performance, we propose the simple Deep Attention Driven Reinforcement Learning (DADRL) framework, which dynamically assigns and incorporates the significance of surrounding vehicles into the ego's RL driven decision making process. We introduce an AV centric spatiotemporal attention encoding (STAE) mechanism for learning the dynamic interactions with different surrounding vehicles. To understand map and route context, we employ a context encoder to extract features from context maps. The spatiotemporal representations combined with contextual encoding provide a comprehensive state representation. The resulting model is trained using the Soft Actor Critic (SAC) algorithm. We evaluate the proposed framework on the SMARTS urban benchmarking scenarios without traffic signals to demonstrate that DADRL outperforms recent state of the art methods. Furthermore, an ablation study underscores the importance of the context-encoder and spatio temporal attention encoder in achieving superior performance.

Sattwik Sahu, Agamdeep Singh, Karthik Nambiar et al.

Off-road traversability segmentation enables autonomous navigation with applications in search-and-rescue, military operations, wildlife exploration, and agriculture. Current frameworks struggle due to significant variations in unstructured environments and uncertain scene changes, and are not adaptive to be used for different robot types. We present AnyTraverse, a framework combining natural language-based prompts with human-operator assistance to determine navigable regions for diverse robotic vehicles. The system segments scenes for a given set of prompts and calls the operator only when encountering previously unexplored scenery or unknown class not part of the prompt in its region-of-interest, thus reducing active supervision load while adapting to varying outdoor scenes. Our zero-shot learning approach eliminates the need for extensive data collection or retraining. Our experimental validation includes testing on RELLIS-3D, Freiburg Forest, and RUGD datasets and demonstrate real-world deployment on multiple robot platforms. The results show that AnyTraverse performs better than GA-NAV and Off-seg while offering a vehicle-agnostic approach to off-road traversability that balances automation with targeted human supervision.

Amith Manoharan, Rajnikanth Sharma, P. B. Sujit

In this paper, we solve a joint cooperative localization and path planning problem for a group of Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs) in GPS-denied areas using nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC). A moving horizon estimator (MHE) is used to estimate the vehicle states with the help of relative bearing information to known landmarks and other vehicles. The goal of the NMPC is to devise optimal paths for each vehicle between a given source and destination while maintaining desired localization accuracy. Estimating localization covariance in the NMPC is computationally intensive, hence we develop an approximate analytical closed form expression based on the relationship between covariance and path lengths to landmarks. Using this expression while computing NMPC commands reduces the computational complexity significantly. We present numerical simulations to validate the proposed approach for different numbers of vehicles and landmark configurations. We also compare the results with EKF-based estimation to show the superiority of the proposed closed form approach.

Shivangi Agarwal, Sanjit K. Kaul, Saket Anand et al.

We propose a novel deep neural network (DNN) based approximation architecture to learn estimates of measurements. We detail an algorithm that enables training of the DNN. The DNN estimator only uses measurements, if and when they are received over a communication network. The measurements are communicated over a network as packets, at a rate unknown to the estimator. Packets may suffer drops and need retransmission. They may suffer waiting delays as they traverse a network path. Works on estimation often assume knowledge of the dynamic model of the measured system, which may not be available in practice. The DNN estimator doesn't assume knowledge of the dynamic system model or the communication network. It doesn't require a history of measurements, often used by other works. The DNN estimator results in significantly smaller average estimation error than the commonly used Time-varying Kalman Filter and the Unscented Kalman Filter, in simulations of linear and nonlinear dynamic systems. The DNN need not be trained separately for different communications network settings. It is robust to errors in estimation of network delays that occur due to imperfect time synchronization between the measurement source and the estimator. Last but not the least, our simulations shed light on the rate of updates that result in low estimation error.

Paras Sharma, Prithvi Poddar, P. B. Sujit

Ability to recover from faults and continue mission is desirable for many quadrotor applications. The quadrotor's rotor may fail while performing a mission and it is essential to develop recovery strategies so that the vehicle is not damaged. In this paper, we develop a model-free deep reinforcement learning approach for a quadrotor to recover from a single rotor failure. The approach is based on Soft-actor-critic that enables the vehicle to hover, land, and perform complex maneuvers. Simulation results are presented to validate the proposed approach using a custom simulator. The results show that the proposed approach achieves hover, landing, and path following in 2D and 3D. We also show that the proposed approach is robust to wind disturbances.

Manav Mishra, Prithvi Poddar, Rajat Agarwal et al.

Determining multi-robot motion policies for persistently monitoring a region with limited sensing, communication, and localization constraints in non-GPS environments is a challenging problem. To take the localization constraints into account, in this paper, we consider a heterogeneous robotic system consisting of two types of agents: anchor agents with accurate localization capability and auxiliary agents with low localization accuracy. To localize itself, the auxiliary agents must be within the communication range of an {anchor}, directly or indirectly. The robotic team's objective is to minimize environmental uncertainty through persistent monitoring. We propose a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL) based architecture with graph convolution called Graph Localized Proximal Policy Optimization (GALOPP), which incorporates the limited sensor field-of-view, communication, and localization constraints of the agents along with persistent monitoring objectives to determine motion policies for each agent. We evaluate the performance of GALOPP on open maps with obstacles having a different number of anchor and auxiliary agents. We further study (i) the effect of communication range, obstacle density, and sensing range on the performance and (ii) compare the performance of GALOPP with non-RL baselines, namely, greedy search, random search, and random search with communication constraint. For its generalization capability, we also evaluated GALOPP in two different environments -- 2-room and 4-room. The results show that GALOPP learns the policies and monitors the area well. As a proof-of-concept, we perform hardware experiments to demonstrate the performance of GALOPP.

Anukriti Singh, Kartikeya Singh, P. B. Sujit

We present OffRoadTranSeg, the first end-to-end framework for semi-supervised segmentation in unstructured outdoor environment using transformers and automatic data selection for labelling. The offroad segmentation is a scene understanding approach that is widely used in autonomous driving. The popular offroad segmentation method is to use fully connected convolution layers and large labelled data, however, due to class imbalance, there will be several mismatches and also some classes may not be detected. Our approach is to do the task of offroad segmentation in a semi-supervised manner. The aim is to provide a model where self supervised vision transformer is used to fine-tune offroad datasets with self-supervised data collection for labelling using depth estimation. The proposed method is validated on RELLIS-3D and RUGD offroad datasets. The experiments show that OffRoadTranSeg outperformed other state of the art models, and also solves the RELLIS-3D class imbalance problem.

Sarthak Bhagat, P. B. Sujit

Target tracking in unknown real-world environments in the presence of obstacles and target motion uncertainty demand agents to develop an intrinsic understanding of the environment in order to predict the suitable actions to be taken at each time step. This task requires the agents to maximize the visibility of the mobile target maneuvering randomly in a network of roads by learning a policy that takes into consideration the various aspects of a real-world environment. In this paper, we propose a DDQN-based extension to the state-of-the-art in target tracking using a UAV TF-DQN, that we call TF-DDQN, that isolates the value estimation and evaluation steps. Additionally, in order to carefully benchmark the performance of any given target tracking algorithm, we introduce a novel target tracking evaluation scheme that quantifies its efficacy in terms of a wide set of diverse parameters. To replicate the real-world setting, we test our approach against standard baselines for the task of target tracking in complex environments with varying drift conditions and changes in environmental configuration.

Rishab Balasubramanian, Lifeng Zhou, Pratap Tokekar et al.

We introduce a risk-aware multi-objective Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) variant, where the robot tour cost and tour reward have to be optimized simultaneously. The robot obtains reward along the edges in the graph. We study the case where the rewards and the costs exhibit diminishing marginal gains, i.e., are submodular. Unlike prior work, we focus on the scenario where the costs and the rewards are uncertain and seek to maximize the Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR) metric of the submodular function. We propose a risk-aware greedy algorithm (RAGA) to find a bounded-approximation algorithm. The approximation algorithm runs in polynomial time and is within a constant factor of the optimal and an additive term that depends on the optimal solution. We use the submodular function's curvature to improve approximation results further and verify the algorithm's performance through simulations.

Sagar Verma, Richa Verma, P. B. Sujit

In this paper, we consider a territory guarding game involving pursuers, evaders and a target in an environment that contains obstacles. The goal of the evaders is to capture the target, while that of the pursuers is to capture the evaders before they reach the target. All the agents have limited sensing range and can only detect each other when they are in their observation space. We focus on the challenge of effective cooperation between agents of a team. Finding exact solutions for such multi-agent systems is difficult because of the inherent complexity. We present Multi-Agent Pursuer-Evader Learning (MAPEL), a class of algorithms that use spatio-temporal graph representation to learn structured cooperation. The key concept is that the learning takes place in a decentralized manner and agents use situation report updates to learn about the whole environment from each others' partial observations. We use Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to parameterize the spatio-temporal graph. An agent in MAPEL only updates all the other agents if an opponent or the target is inside its observation space by using situation report. We present two methods for cooperation via situation report update: a) Peer-to-Peer Situation Report (P2PSR) and b) Ring Situation Report (RSR). We present a detailed analysis of how these two cooperation methods perform when the number of agents in the game are increased. We provide empirical results to show how agents cooperate under these two methods.

Mayank K. Pal, Rupali Bhati, Anil Sharma et al.

Our premise is that autonomous vehicles must optimize communications and motion planning jointly. Specifically, a vehicle must adapt its motion plan staying cognizant of communications rate related constraints and adapt the use of communications while being cognizant of motion planning related restrictions that may be imposed by the on-road environment. To this end, we formulate a reinforcement learning problem wherein an autonomous vehicle jointly chooses (a) a motion planning action that executes on-road and (b) a communications action of querying sensed information from the infrastructure. The goal is to optimize the driving utility of the autonomous vehicle. We apply the Q-learning algorithm to make the vehicle learn the optimal policy, which makes the optimal choice of planning and communications actions at any given time. We demonstrate the ability of the optimal policy to smartly adapt communications and planning actions, while achieving large driving utilities, using simulations.