Towards Learning Path Planning for Solving Complex Robot Tasks

For solving complex robot tasks it is necessary to incorporate path planning methods that are able to operate within different high-dimensional configuration spaces containing an unknown number of obstacles. Based on Advanced A*-algorithm (AA*) using expansion matrices instead of a simple expansion logic we propose a further improvement of AA* enabling the capability to learn directly from sample planning tasks. This is done by inserting weights into the expansion matrix which are modified according to a special learning rule. For an examplary planning task we show that Adaptive AA* learns movement vectors which allow larger movements than the initial ones into well-defined directions of the configuration space. Compared to standard approaches planning times are clearly reduced