Down the CLiFF: Flow-Aware Trajectory Planning Under Motion Pattern Uncertainty

In this paper we address the problem of flow-aware trajectory planning in dynamic environments considering flow model uncertainty. Flow-aware planning aims to plan trajectories that adhere to existing flow motion patterns in the environment, with the goal to make robots more efficient, less intrusive and safer. We use a statistical model called CLiFF-map that can map flow patterns for both continuous media and discrete objects. We propose novel cost and biasing functions for an RRT* planning algorithm, which exploits all the information available in the CLiFF-map model, including uncertainties due to flow variability or partial observability. Qualitatively, a benefit of our approach is that it can also be tuned to yield trajectories with different qualities such as exploratory or cautious, depending on application requirements. Quantitatively, we demonstrate that our approach produces more flow-compliant trajectories, compared to two baselines.