Physics-informed Temporal Difference Metric Learning for Robot Motion Planning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ni, Ruiqi, Pan, Zherong, Qureshi, Ahmed H
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ni, Ruiqi
Pan, Zherong
Qureshi, Ahmed H
author_facet Ni, Ruiqi
Pan, Zherong
Qureshi, Ahmed H
contents The motion planning problem involves finding a collision-free path from a robot's starting to its target configuration. Recently, self-supervised learning methods have emerged to tackle motion planning problems without requiring expensive expert demonstrations. They solve the Eikonal equation for training neural networks and lead to efficient solutions. However, these methods struggle in complex environments because they fail to maintain key properties of the Eikonal equation, such as optimal value functions and geodesic distances. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel self-supervised temporal difference metric learning approach that solves the Eikonal equation more accurately and enhances performance in solving complex and unseen planning tasks. Our method enforces Bellman's principle of optimality over finite regions, using temporal difference learning to avoid spurious local minima while incorporating metric learning to preserve the Eikonal equation's essential geodesic properties. We demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing self-supervised learning methods in handling complex environments and generalizing to unseen environments, with robot configurations ranging from 2 to 12 degrees of freedom (DOF).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_05691
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Physics-informed Temporal Difference Metric Learning for Robot Motion Planning
Ni, Ruiqi
Pan, Zherong
Qureshi, Ahmed H
Robotics
Machine Learning
The motion planning problem involves finding a collision-free path from a robot's starting to its target configuration. Recently, self-supervised learning methods have emerged to tackle motion planning problems without requiring expensive expert demonstrations. They solve the Eikonal equation for training neural networks and lead to efficient solutions. However, these methods struggle in complex environments because they fail to maintain key properties of the Eikonal equation, such as optimal value functions and geodesic distances. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel self-supervised temporal difference metric learning approach that solves the Eikonal equation more accurately and enhances performance in solving complex and unseen planning tasks. Our method enforces Bellman's principle of optimality over finite regions, using temporal difference learning to avoid spurious local minima while incorporating metric learning to preserve the Eikonal equation's essential geodesic properties. We demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing self-supervised learning methods in handling complex environments and generalizing to unseen environments, with robot configurations ranging from 2 to 12 degrees of freedom (DOF).
title Physics-informed Temporal Difference Metric Learning for Robot Motion Planning
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05691