English

DRIFT: Diffusion-based Rule-Inferred For Trajectories

Robotics 2026-03-03 v1

Abstract

Trajectory generation for mobile robots in unstructured environments faces a critical dilemma: balancing kinematic smoothness for safe execution with terminal precision for fine-grained tasks. Existing generative planners often struggle with this trade-off, yielding either smooth but imprecise paths or geometrically accurate but erratic motions. To address the aforementioned shortcomings, this article proposes DRIFT (Diffusion-based Rule-Inferred for Trajectories), a conditional diffusion framework designed to generate high-fidelity reference trajectories by integrating two complementary inductive biases. First, a Relational Inductive Bias, realized via a GNN-based Structured Scene Perception (SSP) module, encodes global topological constraints to ensure holistic smoothness. Second, a Temporal Attention Bias, implemented through a novel Graph-Conditioned Time-Aware GRU (GTGRU), dynamically attends to sparse obstacles and targets for precise local maneuvering. In the end, quantitative results demonstrate that DRIFT reconciles these conflicting objectives, achieving centimeter-level imitation fidelity (0.041m FDE) and competitive smoothness (27.19 Jerk). This balance yields highly executable reference plans for downstream control.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.00936,
  title  = {DRIFT: Diffusion-based Rule-Inferred For Trajectories},
  author = {Jinyang Zhao and Handong Zheng and Yanjiu Zhong and Qiang Zhang and Yu Kang and Shunyu Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.00936},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:57:42.761Z