Warm-Starting Optimization-Based Motion Planning for Robotic Manipulators via Point Cloud-Conditioned Flow Matching

Abstract: Rapid robot motion generation is critical in Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) systems, as robots need to respond to dynamic environments in real time by continuously observing their surroundings and replanning their motions to ensure both safe interactions and efficient task execution. Current sampling-based motion planners face challenges in scaling to high-dimensional configuration spaces and often require post-processing to interpolate and smooth the generated paths, resulting in time inefficiency in complex environments. Optimization-based planners, on the other hand, can incorporate multiple constraints and generate smooth trajectories directly, making them potentially more time-efficient. However, optimization-based planners are sensitive to initialization and may get stuck in local minima. In this work, we present a novel learning-based method that utilizes a Flow Matching model conditioned on a single-view point cloud to learn near-optimal solutions for optimization initialization. Our method does not require prior knowledge of the environment, such as obstacle locations and geometries, and can generate feasible trajectories directly from single-view depth camera input. Simulation studies on a UR5e robotic manipulator in cluttered workspaces demonstrate that the proposed generative initializer achieves a high success rate on its own, significantly improves the success rate of trajectory optimization compared with traditional and learning-based benchmark initializers, requires fewer optimization iterations, and exhibits strong generalization to unseen environments.