One-Shot Multi-Path Planning for Robotic Applications Using Fully Convolutional Networks

Path planning is important for robot action execution, since a path or a motion trajectory for a particular action has to be defined first before the action can be executed. Most of the current approaches are iterative methods where the trajectory is generated by predicting the next state based on the current state. Here we propose a novel method by utilising a fully convolutional neural network, which allows generation of complete paths even for several agents with one network prediction iteration. We demonstrate that our method is able to successfully generate optimal or close to optimal paths (less than 10% longer) in more than 99% of the cases for single path predictions in 2D and 3D environments. Furthermore, we show that the network is - without specific training on such cases - able to create (close to) optimal paths in 96% of the cases for two and in 84% of the cases for three simultaneously generated paths.