Neural Path Planning With Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Networks

Abstract

Path planning is critical for planetary rovers that perform observation and exploration missions in unknown and dangerous environment. And due to the communication delay, it is difficult for the planet rover to receive instructions from Earth in time to guide its own movement. In this work, we present a novel neural network-based algorithm to solve the global path planning problem for planetary rovers. Inspired by feature pyramid networks used for object detection, we construct a deep neural network model, termed the Pyramid Path Planning Network (P3N), which has a well-designed backbone that efficiently learns a global feature representation of the environment, and a feature pyramid branch that adaptively fuses multi-scale features from different levels to generate the local feature representation with rich semantic information. The P3N learns environmental dynamics from terrain images of planetary surface taken by satellites, without using additional elevation information to construct an explicit environmental model in advance, and can perform path planning policy after end-to-end training. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on synthetic grid maps and a realistic data set constructed from the lunar terrain images. Experimental results demonstrate that our P3N has higher prediction accuracy and faster computation speed compared to the baseline methods, and generalize better in large-scale environments.