Trajectory planning is a fundamental problem in robotics, requiring the generation of collision-free and efficient trajectories in a potentially complex environment. While sampling-based planners remain the dominant approach, they are often computationally expensive, particularly in high-dimensional spaces and obstacle-rich environments. Methods based on model learning offer a promising alternative, enabling efficient planning through a bounded number of forward passes through a neural trajectory planner, but commonly suffer from low sample efficiency or limited generalisation due to their reliance on exploration or expert demonstrations. This follow-up work tests our neuro-inspired self-supervised learning framework for trajectory planning that leverages forward and inverse models as the internal supervisory mechanism in an environment that contains an obstacle. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach while revealing a tendency of our planner to exploit the learning signal provided by the forward and inverse models. To address this issue, additional training regimes and mitigation strategies are proposed and evaluated.
Diffusion-based trajectory planners have shown strong performance in offline reinforcement learning, but their iterative denoising process often incurs high inference cost. Consistency-based planners reduce the number of sampling steps, yet they typically rely on a two-stage teac…
For robots to work reliably in commercial and industrial applications, can recent advances in agentic coding systems combine interpretable robot programming with the open-world adaptability of model-free policies? We focus on "Variational Automation" (VA), a class of tasks that h…
Large-scale datasets and fast simulators have enabled improvements in driving policies that appear safe and robust, yet strong performance in nominal scenarios can still mask flawed reasoning and unsafe heuristics. Summary scores from closed-loop simulators do not give significan…
Long-horizon robot planning requires jointly reasoning over semantic task structure and geometric feasibility. To successfully execute a task, a robot must decompose goals, select task-relevant objects, and sequence actions, while ensuring that plans satisfy spatial constraints s…
Deep learning methods have vastly expanded the capabilities of motion planning in robotics applications, as learning priors from large-scale data has been shown to be essential in capturing the highly complex behavior required for solving tasks such as manipulation or navigation…
Offline reinforcement learning enables policy learning from fixed datasets without additional environment interaction, making it appealing for safety-critical applications where online exploration is costly or unsafe. Diffusion-based decision-making methods have recently achieved…