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Balancing Exploration and Exploitation in Motion Planning

Authors: Markus Rickert, Oliver Brock, Alois Knoll

Published: 2008 (Conference Paper)

Source: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Algorithm: EET

DOI: 10.1109/ROBOT.2008.4543636

Summary

Introduces exploring/exploiting trees (EET) which first tries to acquire information about the workspace and exploit it (using a potential-field-like approach), then gradually shifts to exploration only as much as needed to alleviate exploitation failures.

Abstract

Computationally efficient motion planning must avoid exhaustive exploration of configuration space. We argue that this can be accomplished most effectively by carefully balancing exploration and exploitation. Exploration seeks to understand configuration space, irrespective of the planning problem, while exploitation acts to solve the problem given the available information obtained by exploration. We present an exploring/exploiting tree (EET) planner that balances its exploration and exploitation behavior. The planner acquires workspace information and subsequently uses this information for exploitation in configuration space. If exploitation fails in difficult regions, the planner gradually shifts its behavior towards exploration. We present experimental results demonstrating that adaptive balancing of exploration and exploitation leads to significant performance improvements compared to other state-of-the-art sampling-based planners.

Tags

  • Motion planning

  • Path planning

  • Sampling-based

  • Exploration

  • Exploitation

  • Adaptive