Multi-agent path planning (MAPP) is the problem of planning collision-free trajectories from start to goal locations for a team of agents. This work explores a relatively unexplored setting of MAPP where streams of agents have to go through the starts and goals with high throughput. We tackle this problem by formulating a new variant of MAPP called periodic MAPP in which the timing of agent appearances is periodic. The objective with periodic MAPP is to find a periodic plan, a set of collision-free trajectories that the agent streams can use repeatedly over periods, with periods that are as small as possible. To meet this objective, we propose a solution method that is based on constraint relaxation and optimization. We show that the periodic plans once found can be used for a more practical case in which agents in a stream can appear at random times. We confirm the effectiveness of our method compared with baseline methods in terms of throughput in several scenarios that abstract autonomous intersection management tasks.
In the last few decades we have witnessed a significant development in Artificial Intelligence (AI) thanks to the availability of a variety of testbeds, mostly based on simulated environments and video games. Among those, roguelike games offer a very good trade-off in terms of complexity of the environment and computational costs, which makes them perfectly suited to test AI agents generalization capabilities. In this work, we present LuckyMera, a flexible, modular, extensible and configurable AI framework built around NetHack, a popular terminal-based, single-player roguelike video game. This library is aimed at simplifying and speeding up the development of AI agents capable of successfully playing the game and offering a high-level interface for designing game strategies. LuckyMera comes with a set of off-the-shelf symbolic and neural modules (called "skills"): these modules can be either hard-coded behaviors, or neural Reinforcement Learning approaches, with the possibility of creating compositional hybrid solutions. Additionally, LuckyMera comes with a set of utility features to save its experiences in the form of trajectories for further analysis and to use them as datasets to train neural modules, with a direct interface to the NetHack Learning Environment and MiniHack. Through an empirical evaluation we validate our skills implementation and propose a strong baseline agent that can reach state-of-the-art performances in the complete NetHack game. LuckyMera is open-source and available at //github.com/Pervasive-AI-Lab/LuckyMera.
This paper studies the possibilities made open by the use of Lazy Clause Generation (LCG) based approaches to Constraint Programming (CP) for tackling sequential classical planning. We propose a novel CP model based on seminal ideas on so-called lifted causal encodings for planning as satisfiability, that does not require grounding, as choosing groundings for functions and action schemas becomes an integral part of the problem of designing valid plans. This encoding does not require encoding frame axioms, and does not explicitly represent states as decision variables for every plan step. We also present a propagator procedure that illustrates the possibilities of LCG to widen the kind of inference methods considered to be feasible in planning as (iterated) CSP solving. We test encodings and propagators over classic IPC and recently proposed benchmarks for lifted planning, and report that for planning problem instances requiring fewer plan steps our methods compare very well with the state-of-the-art in optimal sequential planning.
To enable safe and effective human-robot collaboration (HRC) in smart manufacturing, seamless integration of sensing, cognition, and prediction into the robot controller is critical for real-time awareness, response, and communication inside a heterogeneous environment (robots, humans, and equipment). The proposed approach takes advantage of the prediction capabilities of nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) to execute a safe path planning based on feedback from a vision system. In order to satisfy the requirement of real-time path planning, an embedded solver based on a penalty method is applied. However, due to tight sampling times NMPC solutions are approximate, and hence the safety of the system cannot be guaranteed. To address this we formulate a novel safety-critical paradigm with an exponential control barrier function (ECBF) used as a safety filter. We also design a simple human-robot collaboration scenario using V-REP to evaluate the performance of the proposed controller and investigate whether integrating human pose prediction can help with safe and efficient collaboration. The robot uses OptiTrack cameras for perception and dynamically generates collision-free trajectories to the predicted target interactive position. Results for a number of different configurations confirm the efficiency of the proposed motion planning and execution framework. It yields a 19.8% reduction in execution time for the HRC task considered.
This paper focuses on Passable Obstacles Aware (POA) planner - a novel navigation method for two-wheeled robots in a highly cluttered environment. The navigation algorithm detects and classifies objects to distinguish two types of obstacles - passable and unpassable. Our algorithm allows two-wheeled robots to find a path through passable obstacles. Such a solution helps the robot working in areas inaccessible to standard path planners and find optimal trajectories in scenarios with a high number of objects in the robot's vicinity. The POA planner can be embedded into other planning algorithms and enables them to build a path through obstacles. Our method decreases path length and the total travel time to the final destination up to 43% and 39%, respectively, comparing to standard path planners such as GVD, A*, and RRT*
Software engineering is a domain characterized by intricate decision-making processes, often relying on nuanced intuition and consultation. Recent advancements in deep learning have started to revolutionize software engineering practices through elaborate designs implemented at various stages of software development. In this paper, we present an innovative paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) throughout the entire software development process, streamlining and unifying key processes through natural language communication, thereby eliminating the need for specialized models at each phase. At the core of this paradigm lies ChatDev, a virtual chat-powered software development company that mirrors the established waterfall model, meticulously dividing the development process into four distinct chronological stages: designing, coding, testing, and documenting. Each stage engages a team of agents, such as programmers, code reviewers, and test engineers, fostering collaborative dialogue and facilitating a seamless workflow. The chat chain acts as a facilitator, breaking down each stage into atomic subtasks. This enables dual roles, allowing for proposing and validating solutions through context-aware communication, leading to efficient resolution of specific subtasks. The instrumental analysis of ChatDev highlights its remarkable efficacy in software generation, enabling the completion of the entire software development process in under seven minutes at a cost of less than one dollar. It not only identifies and alleviates potential vulnerabilities but also rectifies potential hallucinations while maintaining commendable efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The potential of ChatDev unveils fresh possibilities for integrating LLMs into the realm of software development.
This paper focuses on spatial time-optimal motion planning, a generalization of the exact time-optimal path following problem that allows the system to plan within a predefined space. In contrast to state-of-the-art methods, we drop the assumption that a collision-free geometric reference is given. Instead, we present a two-stage motion planning method that solely relies on a goal location and a geometric representation of the environment to compute a time-optimal trajectory that is compliant with system dynamics and constraints. To do so, the proposed scheme first computes an obstacle-free Pythagorean Hodograph parametric spline, and second solves a spatially reformulated minimum-time optimization problem. The spline obtained in the first stage is not a geometric reference, but an extension of the environment representation, and thus, time-optimality of the solution is guaranteed. The efficacy of the proposed approach is benchmarked by a known planar example and validated in a more complex spatial system, illustrating its versatility and applicability.
Language models (LMs) have demonstrated their capability in possessing commonsense knowledge of the physical world, a crucial aspect of performing tasks in everyday life. However, it remains unclear **whether LMs have the capacity to generate grounded, executable plans for embodied tasks.** This is a challenging task as LMs lack the ability to perceive the environment through vision and feedback from the physical environment. In this paper, we address this important research question and present the first investigation into the topic. Our novel problem formulation, named **G-PlanET**, inputs a high-level goal and a data table about objects in a specific environment, and then outputs a step-by-step actionable plan for a robotic agent to follow. To facilitate the study, we establish an **evaluation protocol** and design a dedicated metric to assess the quality of the plans. Our experiments demonstrate that the use of tables for encoding the environment and an iterative decoding strategy can significantly enhance the LMs' ability in grounded planning. Our analysis also reveals interesting and non-trivial findings.
This paper presents CART, an analytical method to augment a learning-based, distributed motion planning policy of a nonlinear multi-agent system with real-time collision avoidance and robust tracking guarantees, independently of learning errors. We first derive an analytical form of an optimal safety filter for Lagrangian systems, which formally ensures a collision-free operation in a multi-agent setting in a disturbance-free environment, while allowing for its distributed implementation with minimal deviation from the learned policy. We then propose an analytical form of an optimal robust filter for Lagrangian systems to be used hierarchically with the learned collision-free target trajectory, which also enables distributed implementation and guarantees exponential boundedness of the trajectory tracking error for safety, even under the presence of deterministic and stochastic disturbance. These results are shown to extend further to general control-affine nonlinear systems using contraction theory. Our key contribution is to enhance the performance of the learned motion planning policy with collision avoidance and tracking-based robustness guarantees, independently of its original performance such as approximation errors and regret bounds in machine learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CART in motion planning and control of several examples of nonlinear systems, including spacecraft formation flying and rotor-failed UAV swarms.
Path planning plays a crucial role in various autonomy applications, and RRT* is one of the leading solutions in this field. In this paper, we propose the utilization of vertex-based networks to enhance the sampling process of RRT*, leading to more efficient path planning. Our approach focuses on critical vertices along the optimal paths, which provide essential yet sparser abstractions of the paths. We employ focal loss to address the associated data imbalance issue, and explore different masking configurations to determine practical tradeoffs in system performance. Through experiments conducted on randomly generated floor maps, our solutions demonstrate significant speed improvements, achieving over a 400% enhancement compared to the baseline model.
Recently, deep multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) has become a highly active research area as many real-world problems can be inherently viewed as multiagent systems. A particularly interesting and widely applicable class of problems is the partially observable cooperative multiagent setting, in which a team of agents learns to coordinate their behaviors conditioning on their private observations and commonly shared global reward signals. One natural solution is to resort to the centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm. During centralized training, one key challenge is the multiagent credit assignment: how to allocate the global rewards for individual agent policies for better coordination towards maximizing system-level's benefits. In this paper, we propose a new method called Q-value Path Decomposition (QPD) to decompose the system's global Q-values into individual agents' Q-values. Unlike previous works which restrict the representation relation of the individual Q-values and the global one, we leverage the integrated gradient attribution technique into deep MARL to directly decompose global Q-values along trajectory paths to assign credits for agents. We evaluate QPD on the challenging StarCraft II micromanagement tasks and show that QPD achieves the state-of-the-art performance in both homogeneous and heterogeneous multiagent scenarios compared with existing cooperative MARL algorithms.