Sampling-Based Motion Planning

Overview

The field studies how robots can find collision-free paths and dynamically feasible motions when their configuration spaces are too large or complex to search exhaustively. Common methods include tree-based planners such as RRT and RRT*, roadmap methods such as PRM, and kinodynamic variants that account for motion constraints; informed and learned samplers guide search toward promising regions. Work also extends these planners to manipulation, multi-robot coordination, moving obstacles, and uncertain or partially observed environments, often using parallel computing to speed up exploration and collision checking. A central tension is balancing fast, reliable solutions with path quality and safety guarantees, especially in high-dimensional or tightly constrained settings.

Latest papers

CardsList

96 papers21 papers in the last four weeks, up 40% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Reward-Guided RRT* for Budgeted Task and Motion Planning

    Oct 26, 2026Vinícius Araújo de Oliveira, Gabriel Ferreira Mendes Lourenço, Paulo L. J. Drews-Jr +2Motion PlanningSampling-Based Motion Planning

  2. Extended LASMP: Language Aided Subset Sampling Based Motion Planner for Drone Navigation

    Oct 25, 2026Saswati Bhattacharjee, Anirban Sinha, Mukulika Ghosh +1Sampling-Based Motion PlanningUAV Navigation

  3. Graphs of Trajectory Bundles for Nonlinear Motion Planning

    Oct 23, 2026Joris Verhagen, Jon Arrizabalaga, Jana Tumova +1Constrained Motion PlanningKinodynamic Motion Planning

  4. FLASH-CBF-RRT: Fast Lipschitz-Adaptive Safe Horizon CBF Steering for Certified Motion Planning

    Oct 16, 2026Mani Amani, Hesam Mojtahedi, Reza Akhavian +2Motion PlanningSafe Motion Planning

  5. Shape-Aware Neural Time Fields for Rigid-Body Motion and Manipulation Planning

    Oct 16, 2026Yanming Zhou, Yuchen Liu, Ahmed H. QureshiMotion PlanningRobot Motion Planning

  6. PATACON: GPU-Parallel Tangent-Bundle RRT-Connect for Constrained Motion Planning

    Oct 9, 2026Gahyun Oh, Junho An, Suhyun Jeon +1Constrained Motion PlanningMotion Planning

  7. Sampling-based Kinodynamic Planning with World Models

    Oct 9, 2026Yitian Gao, Hanlan Yang, Zachary KingstonLatent-Space PlanningMotion Planning

  8. CMP-IRRT*: A Perception-Assisted Height-Adaptive Planner for Quadruped Robots

    Oct 7, 2026Mingfan Zhao, Wendong Mao, Zhongfeng WangQuadruped Robot NavigationRobot Navigation

  9. geodex: A Library for Motion Planning on Riemannian Manifolds

    Oct 6, 2026Phone Thiha Kyaw, Ben Wei, Sepehr Samavi +2Motion PlanningRobot Motion Planning

  10. Pareto-Optimal Entropy-Regularized Trajectory Optimization

    Oct 6, 2026Dimitrios S. Georgiou, Augustinos D. Saravanos, Evangelos A. TheodorouTrajectory OptimizationTrajectory Generation

  11. Beyond Waypoint Regression: Query-Based Cost Learning over Reachable Ego Futures for End-to-End Driving

    Oct 6, 2026Ahmed Abouelazm, Rupert Polley, Qingyuan Zhang +4Trajectory GenerationEnd-to-End Autonomous Driving

  12. Multi-Robot Multi-Goal Motion Planning with Stochastic Skills

    Oct 6, 2026William Schnyder, Valentin N. Hartmann, Stelian CorosMulti-Robot Motion PlanningMotion Planning

  13. Distribution-Transfer Safe-Horizon MPC under Mode Uncertainty

    Oct 5, 2026Stephen Crawford, Nora AyanianChance-Constrained Motion PlanningModel Predictive Control

  14. RUL-Aware RRT*: Degradation-Balanced Motion Planning for Robotic Manipulators

    Oct 1, 2026Haibo Li, Zhiguo Zeng, Xu LiRobot Motion PlanningRobotics

  15. H-SPAR: Hydrodynamic-aware Simulation for Particle Transport and Autonomous Robots

    Oct 1, 2026Navid Zarrabi, Nariman Yousefi, Sajad SaeediContact-Aware Motion PlanningRobotic Data Collection

  16. BLT*: Informed Belief Localization Trees for Uncertainty-Aware Planning on Digital Twins

    Oct 1, 2026Elliot Preston-Krebs, Abhishek Goudar, Timothy D. BarfootBelief-Space PlanningDigital Twins

  17. GPU-Accelerated Path-Dependent Marginal Information Gain for Autonomous Exploration

    Sep 30, 2026João Félix Mendes, Rodrigo Ventura, Meysam BasiriGPU AccelerationRobot Navigation

  18. Sparse Planner: A Hybrid Planner for Efficient Sampling via a Conditional Variational Autoencoder

    Sep 30, 2026Wenguang Xu, Giovanni Lucente, Karem Mohamed +1Adaptive SamplingAutonomous Driving Planning

  19. CollisionSplatting: Collision-Aware Motion Planning in 3DGS Scenes with Image-Conditioned Objectives and Adjustable Conservatism

    Sep 28, 2026R. Khorrambakht, Joaquim Ortiz-Haro, Stephan Weiss +13D Gaussian SplattingModel-Based Planning

  20. Inspection-SPARS: Task-Oriented Sparse Roadmaps for Inspection Planning

    Sep 28, 2026Adir Morgan, Oren Salzman, Kiril SoloveyRobotic InspectionRoadmap-Based Motion Planning

  21. ST-pRRTC: Parallel Space-Time RRT-C with Adaptive Goal-Time Forests

    Sep 24, 2026Duo Zhang, Jintong Li, Junshan Huang +1Motion PlanningSampling-Based Motion Planning

  22. ReVAMP: Vector-Accelerated Motion Planning for Kinematically-Constrained Systems via Reparameterization

    Sep 24, 2026Shrutheesh R. Iyer, Thomas Cohn, Zachary KingstonConstrained Motion PlanningRobotic Manipulation

  23. Induced Riemannian Metrics for Motion Planning with Constraints

    Sep 22, 2026Phone Thiha Kyaw, Thomas Cohn, Miguel Angel Rogel Garcia +1Constrained Motion PlanningTrajectory Optimization

  24. MIRA-PRM: Mission-Informed Reusable Roadmap Planning for Mobile Gas-Sensing Inspection

    Sep 19, 2026Gongsen Wang, Siyuan Wang, Xinyuan Wang +4Roadmap-Based Motion PlanningSampling-Based Motion Planning

  25. Becoming a Fruit Ninja: Real-Time Probabilistic Kinodynamic Planning for Manipulator Projectile Interception

    Sep 18, 2026Lucas Chen, Austin Garrett, Andrew Niu +1Dynamic Robotic ManipulationKinodynamic Motion Planning