DRIFT: Diffusion-based Rule-Inferred For Trajectories
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
| Methods | ISR (%) | PCR (%) | Len. Fid. (%) | FDE (m) | Jerk (m/s 3 ) | Latency (s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BC [ 44 ] | 0.52 | 5.55 | 90.61 | 1.44 | 118.37 | 0.05 |
| CAVE [ 38 ] | 96.80 | 4.73 | 99.72 | 0.041 | 527.87 | 0.09 |
| S2TNet [ 43 ] | 2.35 | 5.32 | 99.73 | 0.712 | 163.19 | 0.08 |
| DTG [ 18 ] | 45.35 | 32.47 | 99.20 | 0.699 | 22.49 | 0.14 |
| DRIFT (Ours) | 91.66 | 5.17 | 99.73 | 0.041 | 27.19 | 0.27 |
| w/o GNN | 87.45 | 5.40 | 99.71 | 0.058 | 22.17 | 0.30 |
Robot Motion Generation
Robot motion generation creates feasible, task-directed trajectories for robots to move, manipulate objects, and interact with people and environments.
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