arXiv AI

Optimal any-angle path planning in static and dynamic environments

arXiv:2607. 00065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Any-angle path planning extends traditional graph-based path planning by allowing movement between any pair of vertices, rather than being restricted by predefined edges.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

Dijkstra as an Oracle for Online Stochastic Shortest Path Navigation with Provable Guarantees

The paper presents DORA, an online learning algorithm for robot navigation that uses Dijkstra’s algorithm as an exact planning engine under a weaker condition than usual causality—specifically, nonnegativity of a reduced cost on a determinized map. DORA calls a shortest‑path oracle a fixed number of times per episode, avoids estimating transition kernels, and incorporates a logarithmic survival weight to keep contact probabilities with dynamic obstacles within a budget. Experiments on grid‑world, directional drilling, and drone surveillance benchmarks show that DORA matches optimistic value iteration with the true transition kernel while performing 4.5 to 19.3 times less planner work, reduces contacts by a factor of seventeen compared to determinize‑and‑replan, and maintains contact rates within wide budget ranges.

By Mansur M. Arief, Ali Akarma, Ahmad Alfan Alfian Irfan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

Diagnosing and Dynamically Filtering Occupancy World Models for Active Mapping

The paper investigates how inaccuracies in pretrained occupancy networks affect active mapping robots that select camera viewpoints to reconstruct unknown 3D scenes. By fixing the planner and varying the occupancy representation—ranging from no completion to ground‑truth occupancy—the authors find that correcting false positives or false negatives alone does not reliably improve coverage, highlighting a disconnect between occupancy accuracy and planning performance. They propose a dynamic filtering strategy that retains predictions in unexplored space while suppressing unsupported occupancy based on online observations, which preliminarily shows it can steer viewpoint selection toward reachable surfaces that would otherwise remain unseen.

By Jiahui Zhang, Gongbo Liang, Yu Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 22

From Distances to Trajectories: Real-Time Signed Distance Function Mapping and Distance-Accelerated Motion Planning for UAVs

arXiv:2607. 19306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous flight in cluttered environments requires a robot to build a geometric map of its surroundings and plan safe, dynamically feasible trajectories, all onboard and in real time.

By Jason Stanley (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Zhirui Dai (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Qihao Qian (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Tzu-Chin Ho (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Tianxing Fan (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Siddharth Saha (Shield AI, San Diego, USA), Christopher Barngrover (Shield AI, San Diego, USA), Ki Myung Brian Lee (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Nikolay Atanasov (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA)
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Balancing Safety and Optimality in Robot Path Planning: Algorithm and Metric

The paper introduces the Unified Path Planner (UPP), a graph‑search algorithm that balances safety and optimality by adaptively weighting heuristics and using a local inverse‑distance safety field. UPP auto‑tunes its parameters during search, guaranteeing suboptimality bounds while improving obstacle clearance. Evaluation on ten simulated environments shows UPP achieving a 0.94 OptiSafe score—significantly higher than existing methods—while adding only 0.5–1% to path length and maintaining a 100% success rate, with hardware validation on a TurtleBot confirming practical benefits.

By Jatin Kumar Arora, Soutrik Bandyopadhyay, Sunil Sulania, Shubhendu Bhasin