cs.ROMar 1, 2026

DRIFT: Diffusion-based Rule-Inferred For Trajectories

Authors: Jinyang Zhao, Handong Zheng, Yanjiu Zhong, Qiang Zhang, Yu Kang, Shunyu Wu

Organizations: Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China · School of Management, Ministry of Education Engineering Research Center for Intelligent Decision-Making & Information System Technologies, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, Anhui, China. · Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

Abstract

Trajectory generation for mobile robots in unstructured environments faces a critical dilemma: balancing kinematic smoothness for safe execution with terminal precision for fine-grained tasks. Existing generative planners often struggle with this trade-off, yielding either smooth but imprecise paths or geometrically accurate but erratic motions. To address the aforementioned shortcomings, this article proposes DRIFT (Diffusion-based Rule-Inferred for Trajectories), a conditional diffusion framework designed to generate high-fidelity reference trajectories by integrating two complementary inductive biases. First, a Relational Inductive Bias, realized via a GNN-based Structured Scene Perception (SSP) module, encodes global topological constraints to ensure holistic smoothness. Second, a Temporal Attention Bias, implemented through a novel Graph-Conditioned Time-Aware GRU (GTGRU), dynamically attends to sparse obstacles and targets for precise local maneuvering. In the end, quantitative results demonstrate that DRIFT reconciles these conflicting objectives, achieving centimeter-level imitation fidelity (0.041m FDE) and competitive smoothness (27.19 Jerk). This balance yields highly executable reference plans for downstream control.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Sep 29, 2026

Trajectory-Level Mode Guidance for Controllable Diffusion-Based Multi-Robot Motion Planning

Motion planning often admits multiple feasible solutions, making multimodal generation valuable, particularly for flexible multi-robot coordination. Diffusion models naturally learn such trajectory distributions, yet incorporating coarse and partial trajectory priors without restricting generation remains challenging. Such priors indicate a desirable region of the solution space rather than a single solution, motivating conditioned generation that preserves multimodality. In this paper, we guide trajectory generation in the clean trajectory space and progressively incorporate trajectory priors with a timestep-dependent guidance strength. At each reverse diffusion step, the reconstructed clean trajectory provides a unified space for integrating planning costs and partial trajectory priors. Planning costs are incorporated through gradient-based refinement, while the partial prior is progressively injected at the corresponding noise levels with decreasing guidance strength. This guides generation toward the prior in early stages while gradually releasing the constraint to preserve the inherent multimodality of the diffusion model. The framework naturally extends to multi-robot planning by incorporating inter-robot collision costs. Experiments on single- and multi-robot planning tasks demonstrate controllable trajectory synthesis, diverse feasible solutions, and safe multi-agent coordination.
Jun 3, 2025

UniConFlow: A Unified Constrained Flow-Matching Framework for Certified Motion Planning

Generative models have become increasingly powerful tools for robot motion generation, enabling flexible and multimodal trajectory generation across various tasks. Yet, most existing approaches remain limited in handling multiple types of constraints, such as collision avoidance, actuation limits, and dynamic consistency, which are typically addressed individually or heuristically. In this work, we propose UniConFlow, a unified constrained flow matching-based framework for trajectory generation that systematically incorporates both equality and inequality constraints. Moreover, UniConFlow introduces a novel prescribed-time zeroing function that shapes a time-varying guidance field during inference, allowing the generation process to adapt to varying system models and task requirements. Furthermore, to further address the computational challenges of long-horizon and high-dimensional trajectory generation, we propose two practical strategies for the terminal constraint enforcement and inference process: a violation-segment extraction protocol that precisely localizes and refines only the constraint-violating portions of trajectories, and a trajectory compression method that accelerates optimization in a reduced-dimensional space while preserving high-fidelity reconstruction after decoding. Empirical validation across three experiments, including a double inverted pendulum, a real-to-sim car racing task, and a sim-to-real manipulation task, demonstrates that UniConFlow outperforms state-of-the-art generative planners and conventional optimization baselines, achieving superior performance on certified motion planning metrics such as safety, kinodynamic consistency, and action feasibility. Project page is available at: https://uniconflow.github.io.
Apr 5, 2026

Primitive-based Truncated Diffusion for Efficient Trajectory Generation of Differential Drive Mobile Manipulators

We present a learning-enhanced motion planner for differential drive mobile manipulators to improve efficiency, success rate, and optimality. For task representation encoder, we propose a keypoint sequence extraction module that maps boundary states to 3D space via differentiable forward kinematics. Point clouds and keypoints are encoded separately and fused with attention, enabling effective integration of environment and boundary states information. We also propose a primitive-based truncated diffusion model that samples from a biased distribution. Compared with vanilla diffusion model, this framework improves the efficiency and diversity of the solution. Denoised paths are refined by trajectory optimization to ensure dynamic feasibility and task-specific optimality. In cluttered 3D simulations, our method achieves higher success rate, improved trajectory diversity, and competitive runtime compared to vanilla diffusion and classical baselines. The source code is released at https://github.com/nmoma/nmoma .