Motion Planning Transformers: One Model to Plan them All

Jacob John Johnson, Linjun Li, Ahmed Qureshi, Michael C. Yip

Keywords: Motion Planning, Attention Networks

Abstract: Transformers have become the powerhouse of natural language processing and recently found use in computer vision tasks. Their effective use of attention can be used in other contexts as well, and in this paper, we propose a transformer-based approach for efficiently solving complex motion planning problems. Traditional neural network-based motion planning uses convolutional networks to encode the planning space, but these methods are limited to fixed map sizes, which is often not realistic in the real world. Our approach first identifies regions on the map using transformers to provide attention to map areas likely to include the best path and then applies traditional planners to generate the final collision-free path. We validate our method on a variety of randomly generated environments with different map sizes, demonstrating reduction in planning complexity and achieving comparable accuracy to traditional planners.

One-sentence Summary: A motion planning algorithm using Transformers for 2D navigation systems.