Predicting initialization effectiveness for trajectory optimization

Jia Pan, Zhuo Chen, Pieter Abbeel

Abstract: Trajectory optimization is a method for solving motion planning problems by formulating them as non-convex constrained optimization problems. The optimization process, however, can get stuck in local optima that are in collision. As a consequence, these methods typically require multiple initializations. This poses the problem of deciding which initializations to use when given a limited computational budget. In this paper we propose a machine learning approach to predict whether a collision-free solution will be found from a given initialization. We present a set of trajectory features that encode the obstacle distribution locally around a robot. These features are designed for generalization across different tasks. Our experiments on various planning benchmarks demonstrate the performance of our approach.