Neural Trajectory Model: Implicit Neural Trajectory Representation for Trajectories Generation

TL;DR

This paper introduces Neural Trajectory Models (NTM), an implicit neural representation for efficient, near-optimal trajectory planning in complex environments, applicable to both single-agent and multi-agent scenarios with real-time performance.

Contribution

The paper pioneers reformulating trajectory planning as query problems over implicit neural representations, enabling fast, scalable, and near-optimal solutions in complex environments.

Findings

NTM achieves sub-millisecond planning time on GPUs.

NTM nearly avoids environment and inter-agent collisions.

NTM generates almost shortest paths and refines conflicting trajectories.

Abstract

Trajectory planning is a fundamental problem in robotics. It facilitates a wide range of applications in navigation and motion planning, control, and multi-agent coordination. Trajectory planning is a difficult problem due to its computational complexity and real-world environment complexity with uncertainty, non-linearity, and real-time requirements. The multi-agent trajectory planning problem adds another dimension of difficulty due to inter-agent interaction. Existing solutions are either search-based or optimization-based approaches with simplified assumptions of environment, limited planning speed, and limited scalability in the number of agents. In this work, we make the first attempt to reformulate single agent and multi-agent trajectory planning problem as query problems over an implicit neural representation of trajectories. We formulate such implicit representation as Neural Trajectory Models (NTM) which can be queried to generate nearly optimal trajectory in complex environments. We conduct experiments in simulation environments and demonstrate that NTM can solve single-agent and multi-agent trajectory planning problems. In the experiments, NTMs achieve (1) sub-millisecond panning time using GPUs, (2) almost avoiding all environment collision, (3) almost avoiding all inter-agent collision, and (4) generating almost shortest paths. We also demonstrate that the same NTM framework can also be used for trajectories correction and multi-trajectory conflict resolution refining low quality and conflicting multi-agent trajectories into nearly optimal solutions efficiently. (Open source code will be available at https://github.com/laser2099/neural-trajectory-model)