Accelerating Motion Planning via Optimal Transport

Motion planning is still an open problem for many disciplines, e.g., robotics, autonomous driving, due to their need for high computational resources that hinder real-time, efficient decision-making. A class of methods striving to provide smooth solutions is gradient-based trajectory optimization. However, those methods usually suffer from bad local minima, while for many settings, they may be inapplicable due to the absence of easy-to-access gradients of the optimization objectives. In response to these issues, we introduce Motion Planning via Optimal Transport (MPOT) -- a \textit{gradient-free} method that optimizes a batch of smooth trajectories over highly nonlinear costs, even for high-dimensional tasks, while imposing smoothness through a Gaussian Process dynamics prior via the planning-as-inference perspective. To facilitate batch trajectory optimization, we introduce an original zero-order and highly-parallelizable update rule: the Sinkhorn Step, which uses the regular polytope family for its search directions. Each regular polytope, centered on trajectory waypoints, serves as a local cost-probing neighborhood, acting as a \textit{trust region} where the Sinkhorn Step "transports" local waypoints toward low-cost regions. We theoretically show that Sinkhorn Step guides the optimizing parameters toward local minima regions of non-convex objective functions. We then show the efficiency of MPOT in a range of problems from low-dimensional point-mass navigation to high-dimensional whole-body robot motion planning, evincing its superiority compared to popular motion planners, paving the way for new applications of optimal transport in motion planning.

Paper

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Peer review

Reviewer hcju6/10 · confidence 3/52023-06-20

Summary

With the aim of improving efficiency in motion planning, this paper proposes an efficient, gradient-free optimization method, MPOT. This is enabled by the introducing the Sinkhorn step, a zero-order parallelizable update rule that is guaranteed to converge under smoothness and boundedness assumptions. The authors perform empirical studies of the effectiveness of their method in 3 benchmarks.

Strengths

- Motion planning is an important task that must be solved quickly while outputting smooth plans to enable the deployment of robotic systems in the real world. As such, this problem is a relevant one. - Both the Sinkhorn step as MPOT are described in detail and, to the best of my knowledge, are novel contributions to the field. - The paper is well written, well organized and clear.

Weaknesses

- The benchmarking results presented in Section 5.2 correspond to two settings in cluttered environments where RRT*/I-RRT* do very well despite the running time cost incurred. Including benchmarks where RRT* fails would be interesting to explore further other potential advantages of this method besides run time complexity. - In Section 5.3, the authors only report results on MPOT and GPMP2, despite the fact that methods like SGPMP solve similar-sized problems in their experiments. A discussion on the limitations of application, or extension of the benchmark would make the case stronger within this setting. **Minor comments**: - In line 386, it should read “At last”.

Questions

- On what hardware is the time comparison from Table 1 being drawn? RRT*/I-RRT* will benefit from stronger CPUs, whereas the other methods have GPU dependencies, so a hardware comparison is important to understand the run time benchmark. - How does MPOT do in other benchmarks where RRT* fails to reach a solution? - Why is MPOT only compared to GPMP2 in the mobile manipulation experiment, instead of considering similar baselines to the previous cases? - Are there other known applications for the Sinkhorn step? The authors comment “sampling methods or variational inference”, but a brief slightly more detailed discussion of this in the paper could improve the contributions greatly.

Rating

6: Weak Accept: Technically solid, moderate-to-high impact paper, with no major concerns with respect to evaluation, resources, reproducibility, ethical considerations.

Confidence

3: You are fairly confident in your assessment. It is possible that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

2 fair

Limitations

The authors have addressed limitations of their work to a good extent in Section 5.

Reviewer 2eXt7/10 · confidence 3/52023-07-06

Summary

This paper proposes MPOT, a gradient-free method that optimizes a batch of smooth trajectories with nonlinear costs even for high dimensional tasks. In especial, a zero-order and highly-parallelizable update rule called Sinkhorn Step is proposed to facilitate the optimization process. MPOT outperforms the baseline methods with respect to the planning speed and success rate, across various tasks.

Strengths

1. This paper addresses a fundamental problem - trajectory smoothing in motion planning, and proposes a solid method. 2. The paper is self-contained and provide very detailed introduction of the method. It is well organized and easy to read.

Weaknesses

1. To enable the batch optimization, it seems that each sequence of optimizing points in the same batch are asked to share the same length, thereby forming a matrix $X \in R^{n\times d}$. Such operation kind of hinders the flexibility of the algorithm to process trajectories with quite different number of waypoints in the batch-wise manner.

Questions

1. Please refer to the weakness. How do you process the sequences with different waypoint numbers? 2. How do you evaluate the planning time of other baselines, such as STOMP and GPMP2? Are other baseline methods also executed in batch? 3. If other baselines are not performed in batch, how do you justify the motivation of performing trajectory smooth in batch?

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

3: You are fairly confident in your assessment. It is possible that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

Yes, limitations are addressed by the authors. I see no negative societal impact.

Reviewer MARJ7/10 · confidence 2/52023-07-07

Summary

The paper focuses on the optimization of motion planning problem, by introducing a gradient-free method that is parallelizable and smooth. The method first probes the costs at several vertices, then decides the optimization direction by aligning the weight matrix with the cost matrix. Furthermore, to enforce the weight matrix as a joint distribution, the method introduces Sinkhorn Step, which is based on an acceleration technique for optimal transport optimization. Results show that the method has significantly low planning time and a high success rate.

Strengths

1. Though including some technical mathematical concepts, the paper has good writing and is easy to understand. 2. Results show the method has significant empirical performance. 3. Technical tricks and limitations are well discussed, for example, Section 4.2 and Section 5.3. 4. Implementing most baselines in PyTorch seems to be a lot of work. This is also a contribution, since it provides a platform to compare fairly with previous methods.

Weaknesses

1. To me, 7 DoF is still not high-dimensional tasks (TIAGo++ should be if you are not using action primitives). So since the author claim that the approach could work better than the baselines in high-dimensional tasks, I would appreciate a systematic comparison to other baselines in more high-dimensional tasks, probably in addition to TIAGo++.

Questions

1. How is D^P initialized at the beginning of the algorithm? I guess it is not that important since you will rotate it for each step, but I still would love to know.

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

2: You are willing to defend your assessment, but it is quite likely that you did not understand the central parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

Limitations are adequately addressed. I do not see any significant potential negative societal impact.

Area Chair ycqk2023-08-19

Please be sure to read the authors' response to your initial review and reply indicating the extent to which it resolves your initial questions and concerns.

Reviewer caUS7/10 · confidence 2/52023-07-07

Summary

The paper proposes a trajectory optimization method using Sinkhorn Step which is able to perform efficient gradient-free batch optimization with non-linear objectives.

Strengths

Gradient-free motion optimization is an important area with broad potential applications. The contribution of the paper is novel. An original update rule is proposed, which significantly improves the converging speed and trajectory quality. The paper is well-structured. The experiment results are adequate and easy to understand.

Weaknesses

It is unclear how the proposed method is compared to learning-based trajectory planning approaches, and also how large is the improvement of the proposed method compared to existing optimization methods when using learning-based trajectory predictions as initializations.

Questions

See weaknesses.

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

2: You are willing to defend your assessment, but it is quite likely that you did not understand the central parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

Limitations are well-discussed in the paper.

Reviewer hcju2023-08-14

Response to Rebuttal

Thank you for the detailed rebuttal, the authors have answered all of my questions. Adding the extra mobile manipulation results will definitely make the experimental section stronger.

Reviewer 2eXt2023-08-17

Thank you for the authors' response. My comments and questions have been addressed. I would like to keep the rating as 7.;

Reviewer MARJ2023-08-19

Good job

Thank you for fully addressing my questions. 36D is high-dimensional, and the new result is definitely impressive. I’ll raise the score to 7.

Program Chairsdecision2023-09-21

Decision

Accept (poster)

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