Distributed Approximation of Joint Measurement Distributions Using Mixtures of Gaussians
Brian J. Julian, Stephen M. Smith, Daniela L. Rus · 2012
This paper is concerned with motion planning for nonlinear robotic systems operating in constrained environments.Motivated by recent developments in sampling-based motion planning and Monte Carlo optimization we propose a general randomized path planning method based on sampling in the space of trajectories.The idea is to construct a probability distribution over the set of feasible paths and to perform the search for an optimal trajectory through importance sampling.At the core of the approach lies the cross-entropy method for estimation of rare-event probabilities.The algorithm recursively approximates the optimal sampling distribution which guides the set of sampled trajectories towards regions of progressively lower cost until converging to a delta distribution at the optimum.Our main goal is to provide a framework for consistent adaptive sampling correlating the spatial structure of trajectories and their computed costs.The approach is illustrated with two simple examples-a point mass vehicle and the Dubins car, and is then applied to a simulated helicopter flying optimally in a 3-D terrain.