Neural Path Planning: Fixed Time, NearOptimal Path Generation via Oracle Imitation Fast and efficient path generation is critical for robots operating in complex environments. This motion planning problem is often performed in a robotxe2x80x99s actuation or configuration space, where popular pathfinding methods such as A*, RRT*, get exponentially more computationally expensive to execute as the dimensionality increases or the spaces become more cluttered and complex. On the other hand, if one were to save the entire set of paths connecting all pair of locations in the configuration space a priori, one would run out of memory very quickly. In this work, we introduce a novel way of producing fast and optimal motion plans for static environments by using a stepping neural network approach, called OracleNet. OracleNet uses Recurrent Neural Networks to determine endtoend trajectories in an iterative manner that implicitly generates optimal motion plans with minimal loss in performance in a compact form. The algorithm is straightforward in implementation while consistently generating nearoptimal paths in a single, iterative, endtoend rollout. In practice, OracleNet generally has fixedtime execution regardless of the configuration space complexity while outperforming popular pathfinding algorithms in complex environments and higher dimensions1.

LEGO: Leveraging Experience in Roadmap Generation for SamplingBased Planning We consider the problem of leveraging prior experience to generate roadmaps in samplingbased motion planning. A desirable roadmap is one that is sparse, allowing for fast search, with nodes spread out at key locations such that a low cost feasible path exists. An increasingly popular approach is to learn a distribution of nodes that would produce such a roadmap. Stateoftheart is to train a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) on the prior dataset with the shortest paths as target input. While this is quite effective on many problems, we show it can fail in the face of complex obstacle configurations or mismatch between training and testing. We present an algorithm LEGO that addresses these issues by training the CVAE with target samples that satisfy two important criteria. Firstly, these samples belong only to bottleneck regions along nearoptimal paths that are otherwise difficult tosample with a uniform sampler. Secondly, these samples are spread out across diverse regions to maximize the likelihood of a feasible path existing. We formally define these properties and prove performance guarantees for LEGO. We extensively evaluate LEGO on a range of planning problems, including robot arm planning, and report significant gains over heuristics as well as learned baselines.