egoTEB: Ego-centric Timed Elastic Bands

Abstract: Our second attempt at integrating the PiPS concept with a local-global navigation scheme. This time we used Timed Elastic Bands (TEB) as the base local planner. Modifying TEB using our egocentric approach leads to egoTEB. A world, grid-based approach has a computational cost that scales with the area of the local grid, whereas the egocircle approach scales with the boundaries. Thus rather than scale quadratically, it scales linearly with regards to the sensing footprint.

Ego-centric Navigation: the egocircle

Abstract: Our first attempt at integrating the PiPS concept with a local-global navigation scheme. It modified the DWA planner in the ROS Move Base package. The procedure required defining the egocircle representation and using it as a body-frame collision and cost-map reference for planning. Both PiPS and the egocircle lead to linear scaling in sensor throughput and collision checking, which is confirmed through computational profiling and compared to other collision checking methods.

PiPS: Planning in Perception Space

Abstract: Explores the use of perception-space, e.g., a visual representation space, for collision checking during navigation through an unknown environment. Employing the Marr's concept of the 2.5D representation, the collision checking approach speeds up the time to collision-checking to permit low latency or real-time navigation on limited compute hardware, as well as high performance hardware.