Improving Trajectory Stitching with Flow Models

Abstract

Generative models have shown great promise as trajectory planners, given their affinity to modeling complex distributions and guidable inference process. Previous works have successfully applied these in the context of robotic manipulation but perform poorly when the required solution does not exist as a complete trajectory within the training set. We identify that this is a result of being unable to plan via stitching, and subsequently address the architectural and dataset choices needed to remedy this. On top of this, we propose a novel addition to the training and inference procedures to both stabilize and enhance these capabilities. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by generating plans with out of distribution boundary conditions and performing obstacle avoidance on the Franka Panda in simulation and on real hardware. In both of these tasks our method performs significantly better than the baselines and is able to avoid obstacles up to four times as large.