Heuristics for Motion Planning Based on Learning in Similar Environments

This paper discusses computer-generated heuristics for motion planning. Planning with many degrees of freedom is a challenging task, because the complexity of most planning algorithms grows exponentially with the number of dimensions of the problem. A well-designed heuristic may greatly improve the performance of a planning algorithm in terms of the computation time. However, in recent years, with increasingly challenging high-dimensional planning problems, the design of good heuristics has itself become a complicated task. In this paper, we present an approach to algorithmically develop a heuristic for motion planning, which increases the efficiency of a planner in similar environments. To implement the idea, we generalize modern motion planning algorithms to an extent, where a heuristic is represented as a set of random variables. Distributions of the variables are then analyzed with computer learning methods. The analysis results are then utilized to generate a heuristic. During the experiments, the proposed approach is applied to several planning tasks with different algorithms and is shown to improve performance.