CAREER: Interactive Decision-making and Resilient Planning for Safe Legged Locomotion and Navigation.

该学院早期职业发展(CALEAR)项目旨在弥合最先进的机器人任务和运动规划与安全和自主机器人移动的最终目标之间的根本差距。这项工作将解决主要的计算障碍，这些障碍阻碍了在高度非线性、混合和欠驱动的腿部系统上使用符号规划和决策方法，降低了它们在非结构化环境中可靠运行、与机器人队友高效协作以及与人类安全交互的能力。需要解决的具体长期挑战包括：对接触地形不确定性的稳健性、运动任务概化、导航安全与复杂的运动动力学，以及主动与行人互动以避免碰撞。该项目将把腿式机器人系统从研究实验室转移到具有挑战性的应用领域，如灾难第一反应人员、土木和机械基础设施中的监控以及农业环境中的种植。与这项研究相辅相成的是以下教育活动：(I)通过佐治亚理工学院的多学期垂直综合计划(VIP)将本科生纳入一个新的以实验为重点的研究计划；(Ii)接待来自亚特兰大少数族裔服务的公立学校的高中生进行研究，并加强大亚特兰大地区未被充分代表的人群的参与；(Iii)通过互动研讨会传播综合机器人研究，以扩大社会影响。该项目将开发一种新的任务和运动规划框架，用于与复杂环境交互的两足动物运动。特别是，它将保留和增强全身动力学感知轨迹优化(TO)的优势，并补充用于环境抽象、正式任务规范设计和稳健决策的符号规划和策略学习能力。该项目将重点放在实验评估上，以便在真实环境中实现变革性的新腿部导航功能。研究成果将使(I)在部分可观察到的环境中的安全导航和与行人的主动互动，同时纳入低水平的运动动力学约束，(Ii)通过对风险敏感和相反的正规化的政策学习，实现多功能的接触行为规划和健壮性推理，以及(Iii)通过行为树的实时移动故障恢复能力，以应对意外的环境干预。该项目将推进腿部系统安全和自主导航的最先进水平，并为未来不同类型机器人团队的研究铺平道路。该项目由跨部门机器人基础研究计划支持，该计划由工程学指导委员会(ENG)和计算机和信息科学与工程指导委员会(CEISE)共同管理和资助。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project aims to bridge fundamental gaps between state-of-the-art robot task and motion planning and the ultimate goals of safe and autonomous robot locomotion. This work will resolve major computational hurdles that have hindered the use of symbolic planning and decision-making methodologies on the highly nonlinear, hybrid, and under-actuated legged systems, reducing their ability to reliably operate in unstructured environments, efficiently collaborate with robot teammates, and safely interact with humans. Specific long-standing challenges to be addressed are robustness to contact terrain uncertainty, locomotion task generalization, navigation safety coupled with complex locomotion dynamics, and proactive interaction with pedestrians to avoid collisions. This project will move legged robotic systems from the research laboratory, and into challenging application domains such as disaster first responders, surveillance in civil and mechanical infrastructures, and planting in agricultural environments. The research is complemented by education activities to (i) integrate undergraduate students into a new experiment-focused research program through the multi-semester Vertically Integrated Program (VIP) at Georgia Institute of Technology; (ii) host high school students from Atlanta minority-serving public schools to perform research and enhance underrepresented population participation in the greater Atlanta area; and (iii) broaden the societal impact by disseminating the integrated robotics research through an interactive workshop. This project will develop a novel task and motion planning framework for bipedal locomotion interacting with complex environments. In particular, it will retain and augment the strengths of full-body-dynamics-aware trajectory optimization (TO) with the complementary capabilities of symbolic planning and policy learning for environment abstraction, formal task specification design, and robust decision-making. This project has a large focus on experimental evaluations to enable transformative new legged navigation functionalities in real-world environments. The research outcome will enable (i) safe navigation in partially observable environments and proactive interaction with pedestrians while incorporating low-level locomotion dynamics constraints, (ii) versatile contact behavior planning and robustness reasoning through risk-sensitive TO and adversarially regularized policy learning, and (iii) real-time locomotion failure recovery capability via behavior trees to address unexpected environment interventions. This project will advance the state of the art in safe and autonomous navigation of legged systems and pave the road for future studies of heterogeneous robot teaming.This project is supported by the cross-directorate Foundational Research in Robotics program, jointly managed and funded by the Directorates for Engineering (ENG) and Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.