Constrained Gaussian Process Motion Planning via Stein Variational Newton Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Jiayun, Pompetzki, Kay, Le, An Thai, Tong, Haolei, Peters, Jan, Chalvatzaki, Georgia
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Li, Jiayun
Pompetzki, Kay
Le, An Thai
Tong, Haolei
Peters, Jan
Chalvatzaki, Georgia
author_facet Li, Jiayun
Pompetzki, Kay
Le, An Thai
Tong, Haolei
Peters, Jan
Chalvatzaki, Georgia
contents Gaussian Process Motion Planning (GPMP) is a widely used framework for generating smooth trajectories within a limited compute time--an essential requirement in many robotic applications. However, traditional GPMP approaches often struggle with enforcing hard nonlinear constraints and rely on Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) solutions that disregard the full Bayesian posterior. This limits planning diversity and ultimately hampers decision-making. Recent efforts to integrate Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) into motion planning have shown promise in handling complex constraints. Nonetheless, these methods still face persistent challenges, such as difficulties in strictly enforcing constraints and inefficiencies when the probabilistic inference problem is poorly conditioned. To address these issues, we propose a novel constrained Stein Variational Gaussian Process Motion Planning (cSGPMP) framework, incorporating a GPMP prior specifically designed for trajectory optimization under hard constraints. Our approach improves the efficiency of particle-based inference while explicitly handling nonlinear constraints. This advancement significantly broadens the applicability of GPMP to motion planning scenarios demanding robust Bayesian inference, strict constraint adherence, and computational efficiency within a limited time. We validate our method on standard benchmarks, achieving an average success rate of 98.57% across 350 planning tasks, significantly outperforming competitive baselines. This demonstrates the ability of our method to discover and use diverse trajectory modes, enhancing flexibility and adaptability in complex environments, and delivering significant improvements over standard baselines without incurring major computational costs.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_04936
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Constrained Gaussian Process Motion Planning via Stein Variational Newton Inference
Li, Jiayun
Pompetzki, Kay
Le, An Thai
Tong, Haolei
Peters, Jan
Chalvatzaki, Georgia
Robotics
Machine Learning
Gaussian Process Motion Planning (GPMP) is a widely used framework for generating smooth trajectories within a limited compute time--an essential requirement in many robotic applications. However, traditional GPMP approaches often struggle with enforcing hard nonlinear constraints and rely on Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) solutions that disregard the full Bayesian posterior. This limits planning diversity and ultimately hampers decision-making. Recent efforts to integrate Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) into motion planning have shown promise in handling complex constraints. Nonetheless, these methods still face persistent challenges, such as difficulties in strictly enforcing constraints and inefficiencies when the probabilistic inference problem is poorly conditioned. To address these issues, we propose a novel constrained Stein Variational Gaussian Process Motion Planning (cSGPMP) framework, incorporating a GPMP prior specifically designed for trajectory optimization under hard constraints. Our approach improves the efficiency of particle-based inference while explicitly handling nonlinear constraints. This advancement significantly broadens the applicability of GPMP to motion planning scenarios demanding robust Bayesian inference, strict constraint adherence, and computational efficiency within a limited time. We validate our method on standard benchmarks, achieving an average success rate of 98.57% across 350 planning tasks, significantly outperforming competitive baselines. This demonstrates the ability of our method to discover and use diverse trajectory modes, enhancing flexibility and adaptability in complex environments, and delivering significant improvements over standard baselines without incurring major computational costs.
title Constrained Gaussian Process Motion Planning via Stein Variational Newton Inference
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04936