CMC-Opt: Constraint Manifold with Corners for Inequality-Constrained Optimization

Yetong Zhang, Frank Dellaert

Keywords: constrained optimization, manifold optimization

TL;DR: This paper introduces an optimization framework that encode nonlinear constraints directly into the geometric structure of the search space.

Abstract:

We introduce a manifold-based framework for addressing optimization problems with equality and inequality constraints found in robotics.
Our approach transforms the original problem into an unconstrained optimization problem directly on the constrained state space.
To achieve this, we introduce "constraint manifolds with corners" to represent the state space satisfying mixed nonlinear equality and inequality constraints.
We further extend manifold optimization algorithms to operate on this new topological structure.
We demonstrate the power and robustness of our framework in the context of a large-scale kinodynamic planning problem, successfully generating dynamically feasible trajectories where standard methods fail.

Submission Number: 50