Autonomous mobile robots (e.g., warehouse logistics robots) often need to traverse complex, obstacle-rich, and changing environments to reach multiple fixed goals (e.g., ware-house shelves). Traditional motion planners need to calculate the entire multi-goal path from scratch in response to changes in the environment, which results in a large consumption of computing resources. This process is not only time-consuming but also may not meet real-time requirements in application scenarios that require rapid response to environmental changes. In this paper, we provide a novel Multi-Goal Motion Memory technique11https://github.com/yuanjielu-64/MGMM_ICRA2025.git that allows sampling-based motion planners to use previous planning experiences to accelerate future multi-goal planning in changing environments. This algorithm allows robots to use previous planning experiences to accelerate future multi-goal planning in changing environments. Specifically, our approach predicts dynamically feasible trajectories and distances between goal pairs to guide the sampling process to construct a motion map, to inform Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) solvers to compute a tour, and to efficiently produce motion plans. Experiments conducted with a vehicle and a snake-like robot in obstacle-rich environments show that the proposed Motion Memory technique can substantially accelerate planning speed by up to 90%. Furthermore, the solution quality is comparable to state-of-the-art algorithms and even better in some environments.

Most, if not all, robot navigation systems employ a decomposed planning framework that includes global and local planning. To trade-off onboard computation and plan quality, current systems have to limit all robot dynamics considerations only within the local planner, while leveraging an extremely simplified robot representation (e.g., a point-mass holonomic model without dynamics) in the global level. However, such an artificial decomposition based on either full or zero consideration of robot dynamics can lead to gaps between the two levels, e.g., a global path based on a holonomic point-mass model may not be realizable by a non-holonomic robot, especially in highly constrained obstacle environments. Motivated by such a limitation, we propose a novel paradigm, Decremental Dynamics Planning (DDP)1, that integrates dynamic constraints into the entire planning process, with a focus on high-fidelity dynamics modeling at the beginning and a gradual fidelity reduction as the planning progresses. To validate the effectiveness of this paradigm, we augment three different planners with DDP and show overall improved planning performance. We also develop a new DDP-based navigation system, which achieves second place in both the simulation phase and real-world phase of the 2025 BARN Challenge2. Both simulated and physical experiments validate DDP’s hypothesized benefits.

Robotics Reinforcement Learning (RL) often relies on carefully engineered auxiliary rewards to supplement sparse primary learning objectives to compensate for the lack of large-scale, real-world, trial-and-error data. While these auxiliary rewards accelerate learning, they require significant engineering effort, may introduce human biases, and cannot adapt to the robot’s evolving capabilities during training. In this paper, we introduce Reward Training Wheels (RTW), a teacher-student framework that automates auxiliary reward adaptation for robotics RL. To be specific, the RTW teacher dynamically adjusts auxiliary reward weights based on the student’s evolving capabilities to determine which auxiliary reward aspects require more or less emphasis to improve the primary objective. We demonstrate RTW on two challenging robot tasks: navigation in highly constrained spaces and off-road vehicle mobility on vertically challenging terrain. In simulation, RTW outperforms expert-designed rewards by 2.35% in navigation success rate and improves off-road mobility performance by 122.62%, while achieving 35% and 3X faster training efficiency, respectively. Physical robot experiments further validate RTW’s effectiveness, achieving a perfect success rate (5/5 trials vs. 2/5 for expert-designed rewards) and improving vehicle stability with up to 47.4% reduction in orientation angles.

When facing a new motion-planning problem, most motion planners solve it from scratch, e.g., via sampling and exploration or starting optimization from a straight-line path. However, most motion planners have to experience a variety of planning problems throughout their lifetimes, which are yet to be leveraged for future planning. In this paper, we present a simple but efficient method called Motion Memory, which allows different motion planners to accelerate future planning using past experiences. Treating existing motion planners as either a closed or open box, we present a variety of ways that Motion Memory can contribute to reduce the planning time when facing a new planning problem. We provide extensive experiment results with three different motion planners on three classes of planning problems with over 30,000 problem instances and show that planning speed can be significantly reduced by up to 89% with the proposed Motion Memory technique and with increasing past planning experiences.

Multi-goal motion planning requires a robot to plan collision-free and dynamically-feasible motions to reach multiple goals, often in unstructured, obstacle-rich environments. This is challenging due to the complex dependencies between navigation and high-level reasoning, requiring the robot to explore a vast space of feasible motions and goal sequences. Our approach combines machine learning and Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) solvers with sampling-based motion planning. Machine learning predicts distances and directions between locations, considering obstacles and robot dynamics, which the TSP solver uses to compute promising tours. Sampling-based motion planning expands a motion tree to follow the tours along the predicted directions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments with vehicle and snake-like robot models operating in unstructured environments with multiple goals.

While sampling-based approaches have made significant progress, motion planning with dynamics still poses significant challenges as the planner has to generate not only collision-free but also dynamically-feasible trajectories that enable the robot to reach its goal. To improve the efficiency of sampling-based motion planners, this paper develops a framework, termed Motion-Planning Runtime Prediction (MPRP), that relies on machine learning to train models to predict the expected runtime of a planner. When solving a new motion-planning problem, the trained model is then incorporated into the motion planner to more effectively guide the search toward parts of the state space that are associated with low expected runtime predictions. This paper applies the MPRP framework to state-of-the-art sampling-based motion planners to obtain new planners, which are shown to be significantly faster.

Representation learning via deep generative models is opening a new avenue for small molecule generation in silico. Linking chemical and biological space remains a key challenge. In this paper, we debut a graph-based variational autoencoder framework to address this challenge under the umbrella of disentangled representation learning. The framework permits several inductive biases that connect the learned latent factors to molecular properties. Evaluation on diverse benchmark datasets shows that the resulting models are powerful and open up an exciting line of research on controllable molecule generation in support of cheminformatics, drug discovery, and other application settings.

Range anxiety is one of the problems that hinder the large-scale application of electric vehicles (EVs). We propose a driving-behavior-based State-of-Charge (SoC) prediction (DBSP) algorithm to overcome this problem. This algorithm can determine whether drivers can reach their destinations while also predicting the SoC if drivers were to return the trip. First, two supercapacitor equivalent circuit models are established with one based on the historical average power and the other based on the equivalent current, which is proposed in this algorithm. Then, based on the equivalent transformation of the two models, an analytical expression relating the historical average power and the predicted SoC is derived by using the equivalent current as a “bridge.” Therefore, the predicted SoC can be dynamically adjusted in response to recorded historical data, including the output power, speed, and distance of EVs powered by supercapacitors. The simulation results demonstrate that the total prediction error is less than 0.5% of the real SoC at different initial SoC and temperature, which represents idealized behavior-based driving. In contrast, in actual driving experiments, the total prediction error is less than 3% of the real SoC at different initial SoC and temperature.