arXiv subjects

Courtney McBeth

Publications and source records attributed to Courtney McBeth.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Scalable Multi-robot Motion Planning via Hierarchical Subproblem Expansion and Workspace Decomposition Refinement

A fundamental challenge in multi-robot motion planning is achieving sufficient coordination to avoid inter-robot conflicts without incurring the large computational expense of searching the joint configuration space of the robot group. In this work, we present a method for multiple mobile robot motion planning that achieves an improvement in planning time up to an order of magnitude by leveraging the insight that we can use discrete search over a workspace decomposition to provide coordination between robots during planning. While prior work uses workspace topology to inform when coordination between robots is needed and then composes robots into their joint configuration space, we take a step further by iteratively refining our workspace representation to allow our planner to search smaller, decoupled configuration spaces.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Scalable Multi-Robot Motion Planning Using Workspace Guidance-Informed Hypergraphs

In this work, we propose a method for multiple mobile robot motion planning that efficiently plans for robot teams up to 128 robots (an order of magnitude larger than existing state-of-the-art methods) in congested settings with narrow passages in the environment. We achieve this improvement in scalability by extending the state-of-the-art Decomposable State Space Hypergraph (DaSH) multi-robot planning framework to support mobile robot motion planning in congested environments. This is a problem that DaSH cannot be directly applied to because it lacks a highly structured, easily discretizable task space and features kinodynamic constraints. We accomplish this by exploiting knowledge about the workspace topology to limit exploration of the planning space and through modifying DaSH's conflict resolution scheme. This guidance captures when coordination between robots is necessary, allowing us to decompose the intractably large multi-robot search space while limiting risk of inter-robot conflicts by composing relevant robot groups together while planning.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

ERUPT: An Open Toolkit for Interfacing with Robot Motion Planners in Extended Reality

We propose the Extended Reality Universal Planning Toolkit (ERUPT), an extended reality (XR) system for interactive motion planning. Our system allows users to create and dynamically reconfigure environments while they plan robot paths. In immersive three-dimensional XR environments, users gain a greater spatial understanding. XR also unlocks a broader range of natural interaction capabilities, allowing users to grab and adjust objects in the environment similarly to the real world, rather than using a mouse and keyboard with the scene projected onto a two-dimensional computer screen. Our system integrates with MoveIt, a manipulation planning framework, allowing users to send motion planning requests and visualize the resulting robot paths in virtual or augmented reality. We provide a broad range of interaction modalities, allowing users to modify objects in the environment and interact with a virtual robot. Our system allows operators to visualize robot motions, ensuring desired behavior as it moves throughout the environment, without risk of collisions within a virtual space, and to then deploy planned paths on physical robots in the real world.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

A Framework for Guided Motion Planning

Randomized sampling based algorithms are widely used in robot motion planning due to the problem's intractability, and are experimentally effective on a wide range of problem instances. Most variants bias their sampling using various heuristics related to the known underlying structure of the search space. In this work, we formalize the intuitive notion of guided search by defining the concept of a guiding space. This new language encapsulates many seemingly distinct prior methods under the same framework, and allows us to reason about guidance, a previously obscured core contribution of different algorithms. We suggest an information theoretic method to evaluate guidance, which experimentally matches intuition when tested on known algorithms in a variety of environments. The language and evaluation of guidance suggests improvements to existing methods, and allows for simple hybrid algorithms that combine guidance from multiple sources.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Extended Reality System for Robotic Learning from Human Demonstration

Many real-world tasks are intuitive for a human to perform, but difficult to encode algorithmically when utilizing a robot to perform the tasks. In these scenarios, robotic systems can benefit from expert demonstrations to learn how to perform each task. In many settings, it may be difficult or unsafe to use a physical robot to provide these demonstrations, for example, considering cooking tasks such as slicing with a knife. Extended reality provides a natural setting for demonstrating robotic trajectories while bypassing safety concerns and providing a broader range of interaction modalities. We propose the Robot Action Demonstration in Extended Reality (RADER) system, a generic extended reality interface for learning from demonstration. We additionally present its application to an existing state-of-the-art learning from demonstration approach and show comparable results between demonstrations given on a physical robot and those given using our extended reality system.

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arXiv2023

Scalable Multi-robot Motion Planning for Congested Environments With Topological Guidance

Multi-robot motion planning (MRMP) is the problem of finding collision-free paths for a set of robots in a continuous state space. The difficulty of MRMP increases with the number of robots and is exacerbated in environments with narrow passages that robots must pass through, like warehouse aisles where coordination between robots is required. In single-robot settings, topology-guided motion planning methods have shown improved performance in these constricted environments. In this work, we extend an existing topology-guided single-robot motion planning method to the multi-robot domain to leverage the improved efficiency provided by topological guidance. We demonstrate our method's ability to efficiently plan paths in complex environments with many narrow passages, scaling to robot teams of size up to 25 times larger than existing methods in this class of problems. By leveraging knowledge of the topology of the environment, we also find higher-quality solutions than other methods.

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arXiv2022

Evaluating Guiding Spaces for Motion Planning

Randomized sampling based algorithms are widely used in robot motion planning due to the problem's intractability, and are experimentally effective on a wide range of problem instances. Most variants do not sample uniformly at random, and instead bias their sampling using various heuristics for determining which samples will provide more information, or are more likely to participate in the final solution. In this work, we define the \emph{motion planning guiding space}, which encapsulates many seemingly distinct prior works under the same framework. In addition, we suggest an information theoretic method to evaluate guided planning which places the focus on the quality of the resulting biased sampling. Finally, we analyze several motion planning algorithms in order to demonstrate the applicability of our definition and its evaluation.

cs.RO↗