How to arrange the robotic environment? Leveraging experience in both motion planning and environment optimization.

Abstract

This study presents an experience-based hierarchical-structure optimization algorithm to address the robotic system environment design problem, which combines motion planning and environment arrangement problems together. The motion planning problem, which could be defined as a multiple-degree-of-freedom (m-DOF) problem, together with the environment arrangement problem, which could be defined as a free DOF problem, is a high-dimensional optimization problem. Therefore, the hierarchical structure was established, with the higher layer solving the environment arrangement problem and lower layer solving the problem of motion planning. Previously planned trajectories and past results for this design problem were first constructed as datasets; however, they cannot be seen as optimal. Therefore, this study proposed an experience-reuse manner, which selected the most "useful" experience from the datasets and reused it to query new problems, optimize the results in the datasets, and provide better environment arrangement with shorter path lengths within the same time. Therefore, a hierarchical structural caseGA-ERTC algorithm was proposed. In the higher layer, a novel approach employing the case-injected genetic algorithm (GA) was implemented to tackle optimization challenges in robot environment design, leveraging experiential insights. Performance indices in the arrangement of the robot system's environment were determined by the robotic arm's motion and path length calculated using an experience-driven random tree (ERT) algorithm. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated with the 12.59% decrease in path lengths by solving different settings of hard problems and 5.05% decrease in easy problems compared with other state-of-the-art methods in three small robots.