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We propose a computationally efficient random walk on a convex body which rapidly mixes and closely tracks a time-varying log-concave distribution. We develop general theoretical guarantees on the required number of steps; this number can…
By utilizing only depth information, the paper introduces a novel but efficient local planning approach that enhances not only computational efficiency but also planning performances for memoryless local planners. The sampling is first…
A simple sample-based planning method is presented which approximates connected regions of free space with volumes in Configuration space instead of points. The algorithm produces very sparse trees compared to point-based planning…
This paper proposes and analyzes a communication-efficient distributed optimization framework for general nonconvex nonsmooth signal processing and machine learning problems under an asynchronous protocol. At each iteration, worker machines…
Autonomous motion planning is challenging in multi-obstacle environments due to nonconvex collision avoidance constraints. Directly applying numerical solvers to these nonconvex formulations fails to exploit the constraint structures,…
In this paper we tackle the problem of persistently covering a complex non-convex environment with a team of robots. We consider scenarios where the coverage quality of the environment deteriorates with time, requiring to constantly revisit…
We propose a new randomized optimization method for high-dimensional problems which can be seen as a generalization of coordinate descent to random subspaces. We show that an adaptive sampling strategy for the random subspace significantly…
Modern sampling-based motion planning algorithms typically take between hundreds of milliseconds to dozens of seconds to find collision-free motions for high degree-of-freedom problems. This paper presents performance improvements of more…
With the development of robotics, there are growing needs for real time motion planning. However, due to obstacles in the environment, the planning problem is highly non-convex, which makes it difficult to achieve real time computation…
This paper presents a new approach to learning for motion planning (MP) where critical regions of an environment are learned from a given set of motion plans and used to improve performance on new environments and problem instances. We…
The Gibbs Sampler is a general method for sampling high-dimensional distributions, dating back to Turchin, 1971. In each step of the Gibbs Sampler, we pick a random coordinate and re-sample that coordinate from the distribution induced by…
We propose a novel algorithm to solve multi-robot motion planning (MRMP) rapidly, called Simultaneous Sampling-and-Search Planning (SSSP). Conventional MRMP studies mostly take the form of two-phase planning that constructs roadmaps and…
Despite the performance advantages of modern sampling-based motion planners, solving high dimensional planning problems in near real-time remains a challenge. Applications include hyper-redundant manipulators, snake-like and humanoid…
We consider unconstrained randomized optimization of convex objective functions. We analyze the Random Pursuit algorithm, which iteratively computes an approximate solution to the optimization problem by repeated optimization over a…
Probabilistic sampling methods have become very popular to solve single-shot path planning problems. Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs) in particular have been shown to be very efficient in solving high dimensional problems. Even though…
Multi-vehicle trajectory planning is a non-convex problem that becomes increasingly difficult in dense environments due to the rapid growth of collision constraints. Efficient exploration of feasible behaviors and resolution of tight…
Mobile robots require basic information to navigate through an environment: they need to know where they are (localization) and they need to know where they are going. For the latter, robots need a map of the environment. Using sensors of a…
Randomized sampling based algorithms are widely used in robot motion planning due to the problem's intractability, and are experimentally effective on a wide range of problem instances. Most variants bias their sampling using various…
Many high-dimensional optimisation problems exhibit rich geometric structures in their set of minimisers, often forming smooth manifolds due to over-parametrisation or symmetries. When this structure is known, at least locally, it can be…
This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…