Simultaneous Multi-Robot Motion Planning with Projected Diffusion Models

ICML 2025
1University of Virginia 2University of California, Irvine
contact: jliang@email.virginia.edu
SMD Poster ICML 2025

SMD is a new method for multi-robot motion planning that combines diffusion models with optimization techniques to ensure the robots' paths are feasible, even in complex environments.

Abstract

Recent advances in diffusion models hold significant potential in robotics, enabling the generation of diverse and smooth trajectories directly from raw representations of the environment. Despite this promise, applying diffusion models to motion planning remains challenging due to their difficulty in enforcing critical constraints, such as collision avoidance and kinematic feasibility. These limitations become even more pronounced in Multi-Robot Motion Planning (MRMP), where multiple robots must coordinate in shared spaces. To address these challenges, this work proposes Simultaneous MRMP Diffusion (SMD), a novel approach integrating constrained optimization into the diffusion sampling process to produce collision-free, kinematically feasible trajectories. Additionally, the paper introduces a comprehensive MRMP benchmark to evaluate trajectory planning algorithms across scenarios with varying robot densities, obstacle complexities, and motion constraints. Experimental results show SMD consistently outperforms classical and other learning-based motion planners, achieving higher success rates and efficiency in complex multi-robot environments.

Video

BibTeX

@article{liang2025simultaneous,
  author    = {Liang, Jinhao and Christopher, Jacob K. and Koenig, Sven and Fioretto, Ferdinando},
  title     = {Simultaneous Multi-Robot Motion Planning with Projected Diffusion Models},
  journal   = {Forty-second International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year      = {2025},
}