DynoJEPP: Joint Estimation, Prediction and Planning in Dynamic Environments
Authors: Mikolaj Kliniewski, Jesse Morris, Yiduo Wang, Ian R. Manchester, Viorela Ila
Abstract
DynoJEPP is a factor-graph-based framework that jointly formulates and simultaneously optimizes estimation, prediction, and planning in dynamic environments. In conventional factor-graph-based approaches that jointly formulate estimation, prediction, and planning, information from prediction and planning feeds back into state estimation, yielding corrupted estimates, undesired behaviors, and unsafe plans. To address this, DynoJEPP introduces a novel directed factor that enforces directional information flow within the factor graph, preventing prediction and planning from corrupting state estimation. We evaluate the impact of directed factors on inter-module interactions during navigation in both static and dynamic environments. Our results demonstrate that these factors are critical for safe operation, as without them, the robot collides in the majority of experiments. Building on this, we further introduce Cooperative DynoJEPP, which enables the ego robot to incorporate cooperative object behavior into its prediction and trajectory planning.
Traditional Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms rely heavily on the static environment assumption, which severely limits their applicability in real-world spaces populated by moving entities, such as pedestrians. In this work, we propose DynoSLAM, a tightly-coupled Dynamic GraphSLAM architecture that integrates socially-aware Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) directly into the factor graph optimization. Unlike conventional approaches that use rigid constant-velocity heuristics or deterministic single-agent neural priors, our framework formulates pedestrian motion forecasting as a stochastic World Model. By utilizing Monte Carlo rollouts from a trained GNN, we capture the multimodal epistemic uncertainty of human interactions and embed it into the SLAM graph via a dynamic Mahalanobis distance factor. We demonstrate through extensive simulated experiments that this stochastic formulation not only maintains highly accurate retrospective tracking but also prevents the optimization failures caused by the deterministic "argmax problem". Ultimately, extracting the empirical mean and covariance matrices of future pedestrian states provides a mathematically rigorous, probabilistic safety envelope for downstream local planners, enabling anticipatory and collision-free robot navigation in densely crowded environments.
Shared-space transportation operation requires low-speed autonomous platforms to navigate safely and efficiently among pedestrians, service robots, micromobility users, carts, and other road users. Most existing systems decompose this problem into trajectory prediction followed by motion planning, which creates one-way information flow: predicted participant futures influence the robot plan, but the selected robot plan cannot influence the predicted multi-agent evolution. This paper presents a joint prediction-planning diffusion framework that treats participant prediction and robot planning as a single conditional trajectory generation problem, where the model samples the future robot trajectory and all participant trajectories from one coupled distribution using a causal Transformer with cross-trajectory attention. To replace heuristic repulsive post-processing, the framework introduces differentiable safety potential guidance, a time-varying occupancy-probability potential whose gradient directly guides the joint sampler, and conditional flow matching is used to reduce inference steps while preserving multimodal trajectory diversity. The evaluation emphasizes shared-space operational effects, including near misses, blockage time, induced participant deviation, hard-braking events, and embedded latency, rather than treating average displacement error and final displacement error as the main result. Experiments in scenario-grounded simulation, naturalistic pedestrian replay, Isaac Sim validation, and ROS/Orin deployment show that joint sampling improves tail safety and runtime efficiency over a separated prediction-then-planning baseline.
In communicationless environments, multi-robot systems must operate without the constant information exchange that many coordination strategies typically assume. This paper presents a novel dynamic epistemic planning framework that enables implicit coordination and long horizon planning through higher-order reasoning among robots. With our approach, robots form and propagate higher-order belief particles, update world beliefs using Bayesian inference, and select actions via a behavior tree that anticipates teammates' likely decisions. A temporally aware Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller integrates this reasoning into low-level execution, allowing robots to plan intercepts and adapt trajectories under partial observability. The proposed framework is evaluated in both simulations and physical experiments, where it consistently reduces task completion time compared to a first-order baseline, demonstrating that epistemic logic can serve as a robust foundation for resilient coordination in communication-restricted domains.