ReVAMP: Vector-Accelerated Motion Planning for Kinematically-Constrained Systems via Reparameterization
TL;DR
This work explores a new axis of vectorization built upon reparameterizing the planning space through analytic IK, and shows that the planner can synthesize plans in microseconds to milliseconds for high dimensional systems, with complex constraints, up to 10x faster than the current state-of-the-art.
Abstract
Robots often must satisfy one or more constraints during motion planning for real-world tasks. When such constraints reduce the valid configuration space to a measure-zero subset, sampling based planning algorithms require modifications to draw feasible samples. For many common end-effector constraints, parameterizations built on inverse kinematics (IK) provide an alternate formulation where the constraints are satisfied by construction, allowing directly sampling the feasible set. Despite their elegant approach, parameterized planners have remained slower than vector-accelerated implementations of projection-based approaches, leaving their performance ceiling an open question. We explore a new axis of vectorization built upon reparameterizing the planning space through analytic IK. This approach addresses existing inefficiencies in vectorized projection-based planners and exposes new opportunities for parallelism within the planner. We show that the planner can synthesize plans in microseconds to milliseconds for high dimensional systems (up to 20 dimensions), with complex constraints, up to 10x faster than the current state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we demonstrate how such planning speeds open up avenues for restructuring sequential manipulation pipelines.