Prithu’s Status Report for 12/10

I spent the final week of our project robustifying the planner as much as possible to get ready for our demo on Monday. I experimented with what to do when the planner is unable to find a path for one (or a few) of the robots. No planner is perfect and this is always a possibility. One option I tried was to sample start points within a certain radius of the robot and try planning from those samples until a plan is found. This puts more of a burden on our controller. Unfortunately, this wasn’t able to work properly. The final (and much cleaner) solution was to reassign that robot’s task to a different one if it was not able to find a plan. This sacrifices a bit of efficiency for robustness but is fine since it’s rare for a path to be uncomputable. I also made some small bug fixes to the dynamic collision checking and post-dropoff motions. Finally, I worked with Saral and Omkar to plan our final demo and film a few videos that we can show as a backup in case something goes wrong on Monday.