Related papers: Hit-and-Run for Sampling and Planning in Non-Conve…
Planning balanced and collision-free motion for humanoid robots is non-trivial, especially when they are operated in complex environments, such as reaching targets behind obstacles or through narrow passages. We propose a method that allows…
Asymptotically-optimal motion planners such as RRT* have been shown to incrementally approximate the shortest path between start and goal states. Once an initial solution is found, their performance can be dramatically improved by…
Planning for legged-wheeled machines is typically done using trajectory optimization because of many degrees of freedom, thus rendering legged-wheeled planners prone to falling prey to bad local minima. We present a combined sampling and…
Sampling-based methods for motion planning, which capture the structure of the robot's free space via (typically random) sampling, have gained popularity due to their scalability, simplicity, and for offering global guarantees, such as…
An algorithm for unconstrained non-convex optimization is described, which does not evaluate the objective function and in which minimization is carried out, at each iteration, within a randomly selected subspace. It is shown that this…
We study sampling problems associated with potentials that lack smoothness. The potentials can be either convex or non-convex. Departing from the standard smooth setting, the potentials are only assumed to be weakly smooth or non-smooth, or…
We present a fast algorithm for the design of smooth paths (or trajectories) that are constrained to lie in a collection of axis-aligned boxes. We consider the case where the number of these safe boxes is large, and basic preprocessing of…
Composition optimization is widely-applied in nonconvex machine learning. Various advanced stochastic algorithms that adopt momentum and variance reduction techniques have been developed for composition optimization. However, these…
This paper presents a Successive Convexification ($ \texttt{SCvx} $) algorithm to solve a class of non-convex optimal control problems with certain types of state constraints. Sources of non-convexity may include nonlinear dynamics and…
In the recent past, several sampling-based algorithms have been proposed to compute trajectories that are collision-free and dynamically-feasible. However, the outputs of such algorithms are notoriously jagged. In this paper, by focusing on…
This paper proposes a solution to the problem of smooth path planning for mobile robots in dynamic and unknown environments. A novel concept of Time-Warped Grid is introduced to predict the pose of obstacles in the environment and avoid…
This paper considers nonconvex distributed constrained optimization over networks, modeled as directed (possibly time-varying) graphs. We introduce the first algorithmic framework for the minimization of the sum of a smooth nonconvex…
Sampling-based motion planning algorithms are widely used in robotics because they are very effective in high-dimensional spaces. However, the success rate and quality of the solutions are determined by an adequate selection of their…
This paper presents a coordination algorithm for mobile autonomous robots. Relying upon distributed sensing the robots achieve rendezvous, that is, they move to a common location. Each robot is a point mass moving in a nonconvex environment…
Standard approaches for global optimization of non-convex functions, such as branch-and-bound, maintain partition trees to systematically prune the domain. The tree size grows exponentially in the number of dimensions. We propose new…
Multicopters with collision-resilient designs can operate with trajectories involving collisions. This paper presents a sampling-based method that can exploit collisions for better motion planning. The method is built upon the basis of the…
In this paper we present a novel probabilistic sampling-based motion planning algorithm called the Fast Marching Tree algorithm (FMT*). The algorithm is specifically aimed at solving complex motion planning problems in high-dimensional…
In this two-part paper, we propose a general algorithmic framework for the minimization of a nonconvex smooth function subject to nonconvex smooth constraints. The algorithm solves a sequence of (separable) strongly convex problems and…
We study nonconvex distributed optimization in multi-agent networks with time-varying (nonsymmetric) connectivity. We introduce the first algorithmic framework for the distributed minimization of the sum of a smooth (possibly nonconvex and…
This research addresses the increasing demand for advanced navigation systems capable of operating within confined surroundings. A significant challenge in this field is developing an efficient planning framework that can generalize across…