Vectorizing Projection in Manifold-Constrained Motion Planning for Real-Time Whole-Body Control

2026-04-14

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of real-time motion planning for complex robotic systems under geometric constraints, which is often hindered by high computational costs. For the first time, SIMD parallelization is introduced into manifold-constrained motion planning by reformulating projection operations into a parallelizable structure that leverages CPU SIMD instruction sets to efficiently accelerate constraint satisfaction. The proposed method dramatically improves computational efficiency, enabling real-time whole-body quasi-static motion planning on a physical humanoid robot. Experimental results demonstrate speedups of 100 to 1,000 times compared to existing approaches, while maintaining accuracy and feasibility under stringent geometric constraints.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Motion and Path Planning
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications

Abstract

Many robot planning tasks require satisfaction of one or more constraints throughout the entire trajectory. For geometric constraints, manifold-constrained motion planning algorithms are capable of planning collision-free path between start and goal configurations on the constraint submanifolds specified by task. Current state-of-the-art methods can take tens of seconds to solve these tasks for complex systems such as humanoid robots, making real-world use impractical, especially in dynamic settings. Inspired by recent advances in hardware accelerated motion planning, we present a CPU SIMD-accelerated manifold-constrained motion planner that revisits projection-based constraint satisfaction through the lens of parallelization. By transforming relevant components into parallelizable structures, we use SIMD parallelism to plan constraint satisfying solutions. Our approach achieves up to 100-1000x speed-ups over the state-of-the-art, making real-time constrained motion planning feasible for the first time. We demonstrate our planner on a real humanoid robot and show real-time whole-body quasi-static plan generation. Our work is available at https://commalab.org/papers/mcvamp/.

Problem

• manifold-constrained motion planning
• real-time whole-body control
• constraint satisfaction
• humanoid robots
• computational efficiency

Innovation

• SIMD acceleration
• manifold-constrained motion planning
• real-time whole-body control
• projection-based constraint satisfaction
• parallelized motion planning