Visibility-Aware Navigation With Batch Projection Augmented Cross-Entropy Method Over a Learned Occlusion Cost

We present two real-time trajectory optimizers based on the Cross-Entropy Method for visibility-aware navigation. The two approaches differ in handling inequality constraints stemming from bounds on motion derivatives, collision avoidance, tracking error, etc. Our first optimizer augments the inequalities into the cost function, while the second one relies on a novel GPU accelerated batch projection algorithm. We adopt a learning-based approach to ensure a fast query of the occlusion cost arising from the environment. Specifically, we train a neural network to compute the occlusion directly from the point obstacles generated from LiDAR or RGB-D sensors. Our learned occlusion model can be queried up to 3x faster than the approaches based on distance computation from occupancy or voxel maps. We improve the state-of-the-art in the following aspects. First, our optimizers do not require any explicit map building and can thus adapt on the fly to the changes in the environment. Second, we outperform existing approaches in target tracking applications in maintaining target visibility and success rate while being competitive in acceleration effort and computation time.