Generative CoLearn: steering and cost prediction with generative adversarial nets in kinodynamic RRT

Abstract

Kinodynamic planning is motion planning in state space and aims to satisfy kinematic and dynamic constraints. To reduce its computational cost, a popular approach is to use sampling based methods such as RRT with off-line machine learning for estimating the steering cost and inputs. However, scalability and robustness are still open challenges in these type of Learning-RRT algorithms. We propose the use of generative adversarial networks (GAN) for learning of the steering cost and inputs. Furthermore, a novel data generation method is introduced, which is easy to learn and, in terms of parameter count, scales linearly to higher degrees of freedom. In our experiments, we show that the GAN has excellent generalisation capabilities, resulting in a considerable improvement in performance compared to the state-of-the-art. Consequently, we show that our method can scale to a planar arm and is robust to data dimensionality.