Progressive Learning for Physics-informed Neural Motion Planning

Ruiqi Ni, Ahmed H Qureshi

Keywords: Robotics, Motion Planning, Neural Fields, Implicit Neural Representation, Physics Informed Deep Learning

Abstract:

Neural motion planners (NMPs) demonstrate fast computational speed in finding path solutions but require a huge amount of expert trajectories for learning, thus adding a significant training computational load. In contrast, recent advancements have also led to a physics-informed NMP approach that directly solves the Eikonal equation for motion planning and does not require expert demonstrations for learning. However, experiments show that the physics-informed NMP approach performs poorly in complex environments and lacks scalability in high-dimensional real robot settings. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel and tractable Eikonal equation formulation and introduces a new progressive learning strategy to train neural networks without expert data in complex, cluttered, high-dimensional robot motion planning scenarios. We show that our approach scales to the real robot set up in a narrow passage environment.
The proposed method's videos and code implementations are available at https://github.com/ruiqini/P-NTFields.