Justin Miller

Michael Everett, Justin Miller, Jonathan P. How

Last-mile delivery systems commonly propose the use of autonomous robotic vehicles to increase scalability and efficiency. The economic inefficiency of collecting accurate prior maps for navigation motivates the use of planning algorithms that operate in unmapped environments. However, these algorithms typically waste time exploring regions that are unlikely to contain the delivery destination. Context is key information about structured environments that could guide exploration toward the unknown goal location, but the abstract idea is difficult to quantify for use in a planning algorithm. Some approaches specifically consider contextual relationships between objects, but would perform poorly in object-sparse environments like outdoors. Recent deep learning-based approaches consider context too generally, making training/transferability difficult. Therefore, this work proposes a novel formulation of utilizing context for planning as an image-to-image translation problem, which is shown to extract terrain context from semantic gridmaps, into a metric that an exploration-based planner can use. The proposed framework has the benefit of training on a static dataset instead of requiring a time-consuming simulator. Across 42 test houses with layouts from satellite images, the trained algorithm enables a robot to reach its goal 189\% faster than with a context-unaware planner, and within 63\% of the optimal path computed with a prior map. The proposed algorithm is also implemented on a vehicle with a forward-facing camera in a high-fidelity, Unreal simulation of neighborhood houses.

Justin Miller, Jonathan P. How

In autonomous Mobility on Demand (MOD) systems, customers request rides from a fleet of shared vehicles that can be automatically positioned in response to customer demand. Recent approaches to MOD systems have focused on environments where customers can only request rides through an app or by waiting at a station. This paper develops MOD fleet management approaches for ride hailing, where customers may instead request rides simply by hailing a passing vehicle, an approach of particular importance for campus MOD systems. The challenge for ride hailing is that customer demand is not explicitly provided as it would be with an app, but rather customers are only served if a vehicle happens to be located at the arrival location. This work focuses on maximizing the number of served hailing customers in an MOD system by learning and utilizing customer demand. A Bayesian framework is used to define a novel customer demand model which incorporates observed pedestrian traffic to estimate customer arrival locations with a quantification of uncertainty. An exploration planner is proposed which routes MOD vehicles in order to reduce arrival rate uncertainty. A robust ride hailing fleet management planner is proposed which routes vehicles under the presence of uncertainty using a chance-constrained formulation. Simulation of a real-world MOD system on MIT's campus demonstrates the effectiveness of the planners. The customer demand model and exploration planner are demonstrated to reduce estimation error over time and the ride hailing planner is shown to improve the fraction of served customers in the system by 73\% over a baseline exploration approach.