tsum
- North America > United States > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago (0.05)
- North America > United States > Michigan (0.04)
- North America > Canada > British Columbia > Metro Vancouver Regional District > Vancouver (0.04)
- North America > United States > Indiana (0.05)
- North America > Canada > British Columbia > Metro Vancouver Regional District > Vancouver (0.04)
Enhancing Robot Navigation Policies with Task-Specific Uncertainty Managements
Puthumanaillam, Gokul, Padrao, Paulo, Fuentes, Jose, Bobadilla, Leonardo, Ornik, Melkior
Robots navigating complex environments must manage uncertainty from sensor noise, environmental changes, and incomplete information, with different tasks requiring varying levels of precision in different areas. For example, precise localization may be crucial near obstacles but less critical in open spaces. We present GUIDE (Generalized Uncertainty Integration for Decision-Making and Execution), a framework that integrates these task-specific requirements into navigation policies via Task-Specific Uncertainty Maps (TSUMs). By assigning acceptable uncertainty levels to different locations, TSUMs enable robots to adapt uncertainty management based on context. When combined with reinforcement learning, GUIDE learns policies that balance task completion and uncertainty management without extensive reward engineering. Real-world tests show significant performance gains over methods lacking task-specific uncertainty awareness.
- North America > United States > Illinois > Champaign County > Urbana (0.15)
- North America > United States > Florida > Miami-Dade County > Miami (0.05)
- North America > United States > Michigan > Wayne County > Detroit (0.05)
Enhancing Robot Navigation Policies with Task-Specific Uncertainty Management
Puthumanaillam, Gokul, Padrao, Paulo, Fuentes, Jose, Bobadilla, Leonardo, Ornik, Melkior
Robots performing navigation tasks in complex environments face significant challenges due to uncertainty in state estimation. Effectively managing this uncertainty is crucial, but the optimal approach varies depending on the specific details of the task: different tasks require varying levels of precision in different regions of the environment. For instance, a robot navigating a crowded space might need precise localization near obstacles but can operate effectively with less precise state estimates in open areas. This varying need for certainty in different parts of the environment, depending on the task, calls for policies that can adapt their uncertainty management strategies based on task-specific requirements. In this paper, we present a framework for integrating task-specific uncertainty requirements directly into navigation policies. We introduce Task-Specific Uncertainty Map (TSUM), which represents acceptable levels of state estimation uncertainty across different regions of the operating environment for a given task. Using TSUM, we propose Generalized Uncertainty Integration for Decision-Making and Execution (GUIDE), a policy conditioning framework that incorporates these uncertainty requirements into the robot's decision-making process. We find that conditioning policies on TSUMs provides an effective way to express task-specific uncertainty requirements and enables the robot to reason about the context-dependent value of certainty. We show how integrating GUIDE into reinforcement learning frameworks allows the agent to learn navigation policies without the need for explicit reward engineering to balance task completion and uncertainty management. We evaluate GUIDE on a variety of real-world navigation tasks and find that it demonstrates significant improvements in task completion rates compared to baselines. Evaluation videos can be found at https://guided-agents.github.io.
- North America > United States > Illinois > Champaign County > Urbana (0.14)
- North America > United States > Florida > Miami-Dade County > Miami (0.04)
- North America > United States > Florida > Hillsborough County > University (0.04)