MORRF*: Sampling-Based Multi-Objective Motion Planning

Abstract

Many robotic tasks require solutions that maximize multiple performance objectives. For example, in path-planning, these objectives often include finding short paths that avoid risk and maximize the information obtained by the robot. Although there exist many algorithms for multiobjective optimization, few of these algorithms apply directly to robotic path-planning and fewer still are capable of finding the set of Pareto optimal solutions. We present the MORRF*(Multi-Objective Rapidly exploring Random Forest*) algorithm, which blends concepts from two different types of algorithms from the literature: Optimal rapidly exploring random tree (RRT*) for efficient path finding and a decomposition-based approach to multi-objective optimization. The random forest uses two types of tree structures: a set of reference trees and a set of subproblem trees. We present a theoretical analysis that demonstrates that the algorithm asymptotically produces the set of Pareto optimal solutions, and use simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MORRF* in approximating the Pareto set.