Title :
Human aware UAS path planning in urban environments using nonstationary MDPs
Author :
Allamaraju, Rakshit ; Kingravi, Hassan ; Axelrod, Allan ; Chowdhary, Girish ; Grande, Robert ; How, Jonathan P. ; Crick, Christopher ; Weihua Sheng
fDate :
May 31 2014-June 7 2014
Abstract :
A growing concern with deploying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments is the potential violation of human privacy, and the backlash this could entail. Therefore, there is a need for UAV path planning algorithms that minimize the likelihood of invading human privacy. We formulate the problem of human-aware path planning as a nonstationary Markov Decision Process, and provide a novel model-based reinforcement learning solution that leverages Gaussian process clustering. Our algorithm is flexible enough to accommodate changes in human population densities by employing Bayesian nonparametrics, and is real-time computable. The approach is validated experimentally on a large-scale long duration experiment with both simulated and real UAVs.
Keywords :
Markov processes; autonomous aerial vehicles; belief networks; learning (artificial intelligence); path planning; Bayesian nonparametrics; Gaussian process clustering; UAV path planning algorithms; human aware UAS path planning; model-based reinforcement learning; nonstationary MDP; nonstationary Markov decision process; unmanned aerial systems; unmanned aerial vehicles; urban environment; Clustering algorithms; Computational modeling; Data models; Kernel; Path planning; Sociology; Statistics;
Conference_Titel :
Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2014 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Hong Kong
DOI :
10.1109/ICRA.2014.6907000