Ultrafast Sampling-based Kinodynamic Planning via Differential Flatness

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Duong, Thai, Ramsey, Clayton W., Kingston, Zachary, Thomason, Wil, Kavraki, Lydia E.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866917427031310336
author Duong, Thai
Ramsey, Clayton W.
Kingston, Zachary
Thomason, Wil
Kavraki, Lydia E.
author_facet Duong, Thai
Ramsey, Clayton W.
Kingston, Zachary
Thomason, Wil
Kavraki, Lydia E.
contents Motion planning under dynamics constraints, i.e, kinodynamic planning, enables safe robot operation by generating dynamically feasible trajectories that the robot can accurately track. For high-DOF robots such as manipulators, sampling-based motion planners are commonly used, especially for complex tasks in cluttered environments. However, enforcing constraints on robot dynamics in such planners requires solving either challenging two-point boundary value problems (BVPs) or propagating robot dynamics, both of which cause computational bottlenecks that drastically increase planning times. Meanwhile, recent efforts have shown that sampling-based motion planners can generate plans in microseconds using parallelization, but are limited to geometric paths. This paper develops FLASK, a fast parallelized sampling-based kinodynamic motion planning framework for a broad class of differentially flat robot systems, including manipulators, ground and aerial vehicles, and more. Differential flatness allows us to transform the motion planning problem from the original state space to a flat output space, where an analytical time-parameterized solution of the BVP problem can be obtained. A trajectory in the flat output space is then converted back to a closed-form dynamically feasible trajectory in the original state space, enabling fast validation via ``single instruction, multiple data" parallelism. Our framework is fast, exact, and compatible with any sampling-based motion planner, while offering theoretical guarantees on probabilistic exhaustibility and asymptotic optimality based on the closed-form BVP solutions. We extensively verify the effectiveness of our approach in both simulated benchmarks and real experiments with cluttered and dynamic environments, requiring mere microseconds to milliseconds of planning time.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16059
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ultrafast Sampling-based Kinodynamic Planning via Differential Flatness
Duong, Thai
Ramsey, Clayton W.
Kingston, Zachary
Thomason, Wil
Kavraki, Lydia E.
Robotics
Motion planning under dynamics constraints, i.e, kinodynamic planning, enables safe robot operation by generating dynamically feasible trajectories that the robot can accurately track. For high-DOF robots such as manipulators, sampling-based motion planners are commonly used, especially for complex tasks in cluttered environments. However, enforcing constraints on robot dynamics in such planners requires solving either challenging two-point boundary value problems (BVPs) or propagating robot dynamics, both of which cause computational bottlenecks that drastically increase planning times. Meanwhile, recent efforts have shown that sampling-based motion planners can generate plans in microseconds using parallelization, but are limited to geometric paths. This paper develops FLASK, a fast parallelized sampling-based kinodynamic motion planning framework for a broad class of differentially flat robot systems, including manipulators, ground and aerial vehicles, and more. Differential flatness allows us to transform the motion planning problem from the original state space to a flat output space, where an analytical time-parameterized solution of the BVP problem can be obtained. A trajectory in the flat output space is then converted back to a closed-form dynamically feasible trajectory in the original state space, enabling fast validation via ``single instruction, multiple data" parallelism. Our framework is fast, exact, and compatible with any sampling-based motion planner, while offering theoretical guarantees on probabilistic exhaustibility and asymptotic optimality based on the closed-form BVP solutions. We extensively verify the effectiveness of our approach in both simulated benchmarks and real experiments with cluttered and dynamic environments, requiring mere microseconds to milliseconds of planning time.
title Ultrafast Sampling-based Kinodynamic Planning via Differential Flatness
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16059