MERS

Diffusion-Guided Multi-Arm Motion Planning

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
CoRL 2025
RSS '25 MRS

High-Level Overview of our Approach

High-Level Overview

We present Diffusion-Guided Multi-Arm Motion Planning (DG-MAP), a MAPF-inspired framework that scales learning-based planners to many robotic arms without requiring massive multi-arm datasets. DG-MAP decomposes planning into single-arm trajectories and pairwise collision handling: one conditional diffusion model proposes feasible motions for each arm, while a second models dual-arm dynamics to resolve collisions. This structured integration enables efficient, coordinated plans over long horizons and larger teams, delivering strong performance across tasks and team sizes.

Summary Video

One minute spotlight video summarizing our work.

Abstract

Multi-arm motion planning is fundamental for enabling arms to complete complex long-horizon tasks in shared spaces efficiently but current methods struggle with scalability due to exponential state-space growth and reliance on large training datasets for learned models. Inspired by Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), which decomposes planning into single-agent problems coupled with collision resolution, we propose a novel diffusion-guided multi-arm planner (DG-MAP) that enhances scalability of learning-based models while reducing their reliance on massive multi-arm datasets. Recognizing that collisions are primarily pairwise, we train two conditional diffusion models, one to generate feasible single-arm trajectories, and a second, to model the dual-arm dynamics required for effective pairwise collision resolution. By integrating these specialized generative models within a MAPF-inspired structured decomposition, our planner efficiently scales to larger number of arms. Evaluations against alternative learning-based methods across various team sizes demonstrate our method's effectiveness and practical applicability.

Multi-Arm Pick and Place Task

DG-MAP on Selected Tasks

Compressed GIFs to save memory.

Poster

BibTeX


        @InProceedings{pmlr-v305-parimi25a,
          title = {Diffusion-Guided Multi-Arm Motion Planning},
          author = {Parimi, Viraj and Williams, Brian C.},
          booktitle = {Proceedings of The 9th Conference on Robot Learning},
          pages = {4684--4696},
          year = {2025},
          editor = {Lim, Joseph and Song, Shuran and Park, Hae-Won},
          volume = {305},
          series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
          month = {27--30 Sep},
          publisher = {PMLR},
          pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v305/main/assets/parimi25a/parimi25a.pdf},
          url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v305/parimi25a.html},
        }