Geometry-Aware Sampling-Based Motion Planning on Riemannian Manifolds
For robot motion planning problems with non-Euclidean geometry, this work bridges scalability and geometric fidelity, offering a practical method for computing geodesic paths in high-dimensional configuration spaces.
The paper introduces a sampling-based motion planning framework that operates directly on Riemannian manifolds, using a midpoint-based geodesic distance approximation with third-order accuracy. Experiments on robotic systems show it consistently produces lower-cost trajectories than Euclidean-based planners and numerical geodesic solvers.
In many robot motion planning problems, task objectives and physical constraints induce non-Euclidean geometry on the configuration space, yet many planners operate using Euclidean distances that ignore this structure. We address the problem of planning collision-free motions that minimize length under configuration-dependent Riemannian metrics, corresponding to geodesics on the configuration manifold. Conventional numerical methods for computing such paths do not scale well to high-dimensional systems, while sampling-based planners trade scalability for geometric fidelity. To bridge this gap, we propose a sampling-based motion planning framework that operates directly on Riemannian manifolds. We introduce a computationally efficient midpoint-based approximation of the Riemannian geodesic distance and prove that it matches the true Riemannian distance with third-order accuracy. Building on this approximation, we design a local planner that traces the manifold using first-order retractions guided by Riemannian natural gradients. Experiments on a two-link planar arm and a 7-DoF Franka manipulator under a kinetic-energy metric, as well as on rigid-body planning in $\mathrm{SE}(2)$ with non-holonomic motion constraints, demonstrate that our approach consistently produces lower-cost trajectories than Euclidean-based planners and classical numerical geodesic-solver baselines.