SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2202.00772

PiP-X: Online feedback motion planning/replanning in dynamic environments using invariant funnels

Abstract

Computing kinodynamically feasible motion plans and repairing them on-the-fly as the environment changes is a challenging, yet relevant problem in robot-navigation. We propose a novel online single-query sampling-based motion re-planning algorithm - PiP-X, using finite-time invariant sets - funnels. We combine concepts from sampling-based methods, nonlinear systems analysis and control theory to create a single framework that enables feedback motion re-planning for any general nonlinear dynamical system in dynamic workspaces. A volumetric funnel-graph is constructed using sampling-based methods, and an optimal funnel-path from robot configuration to a desired goal region is then determined by computing the shortest-path subtree in it. Analysing and formally quantifying the stability of trajectories using Lyapunov level-set theory ensures kinodynamic feasibility and guaranteed set-invariance of the solution-paths. The use of incremental search techniques and a pre-computed library of motion-primitives ensure that our method can be used for quick online rewiring of controllable motion plans in densely cluttered and dynamic environments. We represent traversability and sequencibility of trajectories together in the form of an augmented directed-graph, helping us leverage discrete graph-based replanning algorithms to efficiently recompute feasible and controllable motion plans that are volumetric in nature. We validate our approach on a simulated 6DOF quadrotor platform in a variety of scenarios within a maze and random forest environment. From repeated experiments, we analyse the performance in terms of algorithm-success and length of traversed-trajectory.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Mohamed Khalid M Jaffar, Michael Otte. 2022-02-01. PiP-X: Online feedback motion planning/replanning in dynamic environments using invariant funnels. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21090-7_9

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

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

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

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

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