Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1802.07199

A Parametric MPC Approach to Balancing the Cost of Abstraction for Differential-Drive Mobile Robots

Paul Glotfelter·Magnus Egerstedt
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

When designing control strategies for differential-drive mobile robots, one standard tool is the consideration of a point at a fixed distance along a line orthogonal to the wheel axis instead of the full pose of the vehicle. This abstraction supports replacing the non-holonomic, three-state unicycle model with a much simpler two-state single-integrator model (i.e., a velocity-controlled point). Yet this transformation comes at a performance cost, through the robot's precision and maneuverability. This work contains derivations for expressions of these precision and maneuverability costs in terms of the transformation's parameters. Furthermore, these costs show that only selecting the parameter once over the course of an application may cause an undue loss of precision. Model Predictive Control (MPC) represents one such method to ameliorate this condition. However, MPC typically realizes a control signal, rather than a parameter, so this work also proposes a Parametric Model Predictive Control (PMPC) method for parameter and sampling horizon optimization. Experimental results are presented that demonstrate the effects of the parameterization on the deployment of algorithms developed for the single-integrator model on actual differential-drive mobile robots.

Explore related subjects

cs.ROcs.SYeess.SY

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Paul Glotfelter, Magnus Egerstedt. 2018-02-20. A Parametric MPC Approach to Balancing the Cost of Abstraction for Differential-Drive Mobile Robots. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07199

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language backbones to achieve strong cross-task generalization. A leading design couples this backbone with a dedicated continuous action head trained via diffusion or flow matching. However, such heads rely on iterative multi-step sampling, for example 10 Euler steps in $\pi_{0.5}$. This creates an inference bottleneck that produces stop-and-go movement in the robot and slower task completion. We introduce IMLE-VLA, which replaces the iterative action head with a single-step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). The cIMLE objective promotes multimodal action coverage, avoiding the mode collapse of naive regression heads while eliminating multi-step sampling entirely. When IMLE-VLA is applied to $\pi_{0.5}$, it increases inference frequency 3.67x (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz), enabling up to 11x higher action throughput. On the 40-task LIBERO benchmark, IMLE-VLA achieves the highest average success rate (98.0%) among all baselines while leading in inference frequency. Under the test-time perturbations of LIBERO-plus, IMLE-VLA retains $\pi_{0.5}$'s robustness while other baselines degrade sharply, confirming that the cIMLE head preserves generalization. Real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda across four tasks demonstrate smoother motion (2.2x to 3.0x lower jerk) and faster task completion, with IMLE-VLA outperforming $\pi_{0.5}$ on every task and reducing average VLA inference time per episode by 3.9x to 6.6x. Videos and code are available at https://kianhk6.github.io/IMLE-VLA/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

ObstaDiff: Generalizable Diffusion Policy Learning via Obstacle-aware Representations

Imitation learning has achieved impressive results in robotic manipulation, yet most existing approaches assume clean backgrounds and lack explicit mechanisms for obstacle-aware motion generation. Extending such policies to cluttered, real-world scenes with unstructured obstacles remains a key generalization challenge. We present ObstaDiff, a decomposed diffusion-policy framework with a lightweight obstacle-aware visual encoder. ObstaDiff extracts a structured target-obstacle-background representation, enabling the downstream alignment policy to generate end-effector trajectories toward a target-centered bottleneck pose while reasoning about surrounding obstacles. We evaluate ObstaDiff on 61 real-robot greenhouse trials per method (366 executions in total). ObstaDiff achieves 75.41% average task success and 8.20% average obstacle collision rate, outperforming representative imitation-learning baselines and improving generalization in cluttered agricultural scenes.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Testing Between the Test Cases: Proving End-to-End Steering in Conditions You Never Drove

AI-based automated vehicle testing is challenging because a model that passes every test condition can still fail in the real world. Formal verification offers a way to directly address this gap. On a simulated highway and an arterial road we trained two small end-to-end steering networks each in CARLA, one on clear conditions alone and one on clear, fog, night and low sun. All four models were driven against a 2.19 ft lane-departure budget. Without driving again, we used bound propagation, a formal method that reads the trained weights, to compute how far steering can drift at every disturbance strength between two captured images. One calculation covers more than a campaign could drive: on the arterial it spans 133 poses, where ten intensities each would be 10^133 combinations, in minutes on one GPU. Not only did formal verification find conditions that broke the clear-trained policy without simulation testing, it provided some preliminary evidence for potential failures between the test cases. Our overall conclusion is that formal verification is a viable complement to simulation, and could be adopted as a part of verification and validation for automated driving.

cs.RO↗