GPD: Guided Polynomial Diffusion for Motion Planning

Diffusion-based motion planners are becoming popular due to their well-established performance improvements, stemming from sample diversity and the ease of incorporating new constraints directly during inference. However, a primary limitation of the diffusion process is the requirement for a substantial number of denoising steps, especially when the denoising process is coupled with gradient-based guidance. In this paper, we introduce, diffusion in the parametric space of trajectories, where the parameters are represented as Bernstein coefficients. We show that this representation greatly improves the effectiveness of the cost function guidance and the inference speed. We also introduce a novel stitching algorithm that leverages the diversity in diffusion-generated trajectories to produce collision-free trajectories with just a single cost function-guided model. We demonstrate that our approaches outperform current SOTA diffusion-based motion planners for manipulators and provide an ablation study on key components.

Zutu: A Platform for Localization and Navigation of Swarm Robots Using Virtual Grids

Swarm robots, which are inspired from the way insects behave collectively in order to achieve a common goal, have become a major part of research with applications involving search and rescue, area exploration, surveillance etc. In this paper, we present a swarm of robots that do not require individual extrinsic sensors to sense the environment but instead use a single central camera to locate and map the swarm. The robots can be easily built using readily available components with the main chassis being 3D printed, making the system low-cost, low-maintenance, and easy to replicate. We describe Zutu's hardware and software architecture, the algorithms to map the robots to the real world, and some experiments conducted using four of our robots. Eventually, we conclude the possible applications of our system in research, education, and industries.