Ergodic Trajectory Design by Learned Pushforward Maps: Provable Coverage via Conditional Flow Matching
For roboticists and control engineers designing continuous trajectories for UAVs, this provides a scalable, provable approach to ergodic coverage that handles constraints like no-fly zones and energy limits without online re-optimization.
The paper tackles the ergodic coverage problem for UAVs and other agents, proposing a framework that decouples ergodicity from density matching using a learned pushforward map via conditional flow matching. It achieves provable coverage with an O(1/√K) convergence rate and end-to-end coverage bounds, enabling offline training for unbounded trajectories and multi-agent fleets without per-agent retraining.
Designing continuous trajectories whose time-averaged occupancy provably matches a prescribed spatial density (the \emph{ergodic coverage} problem) is central to UAV-assisted data collection and sensing, robotic exploration, and mobile monitoring. For flying agents in particular, this challenge is acute: trajectories must balance coverage fidelity against tight energy budgets, no-fly zones, and acceleration limits. Existing methods either re-optimize each trajectory online (with cost growing in the horizon and re-running for every target, agent, and realization) or rely on bespoke analytical constructions that must be re-derived for each new constraint. We propose a \emph{epushforward} framework that decouples ergodicity from density matching: an analytic latent trajectory provides exact uniform ergodicity on a simple annular domain, and a single map, learned offline by optimal-transport conditional flow matching, transports this latent occupancy onto the prescribed target density. The composed trajectory is then asymptotically ergodic with respect to the learned pushforward distribution, with deviation from the target controlled by the flow-matching training loss. Once trained for a given target density and constraint set, the map serves an unbounded number of trajectories and a multi-agent fleet without per-agent retraining, and many differentiable operational constraints (no-fly zones, acceleration ceilings, or fairness penalties) enter as additive soft penalties in the training loss without re-deriving the design. We prove three results (an acceleration-energy bound, an $O(1/\sqrt{K})$ ergodic convergence rate in the number of trajectory cycles $K$, and an approximation-error bound) that combine into an end-to-end coverage bound estimable from CFM training diagnostics (certified given an architectural Lipschitz bound on $v_θ$).