Apr 30, 2026 · cs.ROJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Seungho Han, Seokju Lee, Jeonguk Kang
School of Electrical Engineering, Hanyang University, Ansan 15588, South Korea. · Mechatronics, Systems and Control Lab (MSC Lab), Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 34141, South Korea. · Samsung Research, Samsung Electronics, Seoul, South Korea.
Dense, dynamic crowds pose a persistent challenge for autonomous mobile robots. Purely reactive planning methods, such as Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control, often fail to escape local minima in complex scenarios due to their limited prediction horizon. To bridge this gap, we propose Ray-based Task-Oriented Latent Dynamics (RAY-TOLD), a hybrid control architecture that integrates obstacle information into latent dynamics and utilizes the robustness of physics-based MPPI with the long-horizon foresight of reinforcement learning. RAY-TOLD leverages a LiDAR-centric latent dynamics model to encode high-dimensional sensor data into a compact state representation, enabling the learning of a terminal value function and a policy prior. We introduce a policy mixture sampling strategy that augments the MPPI candidate population with trajectories derived from the learned policy, effectively guiding the planner towards the goal while maintaining kinematic feasibility. Extensive tests in a stochastic environment with high-density dynamic obstacles demonstrate that our method outperforms the MPPI baseline, reducing the collision rate. The results confirm that blending short-horizon physics-based rollouts with learned long-horizon intent significantly enhances navigation reliability and safety.