Batch planning is increasingly necessary to quickly produce diverse and high-quality motion plans for downstream learning applications, such as distillation and imitation learning. This paper presents Global Tensor Motion Planning (GTMP) -- a sampling-based motion planning algorithm comprising only tensor operations. We introduce a novel discretization structure represented as a random multipartite graph, enabling efficient vectorized sampling, collision checking, and search. We provide a theoretical investigation showing that GTMP exhibits probabilistic completeness while supporting modern GPU/TPU. Additionally, by incorporating smooth structures into the multipartite graph, GTMP directly plans smooth splines without requiring gradient-based optimization. Experiments on lidar-scanned occupancy maps and the MotionBenchMarker dataset demonstrate GTMP's computation efficiency in batch planning compared to baselines, underscoring GTMP's potential as a robust, scalable planner for diverse applications and large-scale robot learning tasks.

To operate autonomously, such systems and agents often rely on automated controllers, which are designed to translate a stream of sensor observations or system states into a stream of commands (controls) to execute, in order to maintain a safe behavior, or robustly perform a specified task. Traditionally, controllers had to be expertly designed, e.g., by meticulously considering physical and mechanical aspects of the system. In recent years, however, computational Neural-Network (NN) controllers have been experiencing tremendous popularity. These can handle complex, highdimensional sensor observations, such as images, and enable effective control of highly-complex dynamical systems, such as racing cars, snake robots, high Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) manipulators, and dexterous robot hands, which have been a great challenge in the controls and robotics communities. Such controllers are typically built ("trained") by compressing numerous examples ("training data") using statistical machine learning techniques, in an attempt to yield a certain behavior. Common techniques include Reinforcement Learning (RL) [2], from repeated trial-and-error control attempts, until apparent convergence to a desired behavior, and Imitation Learning [3], from demonstrations of either a human operator or a traditional controller. Unfortunately, such learning methods generally do not provide a guarantee that the resulting controller will robustly exhibit the desired behavior; hence, relying on these controllers can cause the system to suffer from unpredictable or unsafe behavior on edge cases. While there has been a recent efforts to advance controller synthesis [4-6]--that is, the automated creation of controllers that are guaranteed to comply to given specification by design--these usually fail to scale beyond simple scenarios; and, more importantly, are only certified in relation to the assumed (and often simplified) system models.

Sampling-based motion planners (SBMPs) are effective for planning with complex kinodynamic constraints in high-dimensional spaces, but they still struggle to achieve real-time performance, which is mainly due to their serial computation design. We present Kinodynamic Parallel Accelerated eXpansion (Kino-PAX), a novel highly parallel kinodynamic SBMP designed for parallel devices such as GPUs. Kino-PAX grows a tree of trajectory segments directly in parallel. Our key insight is how to decompose the iterative tree growth process into three massively parallel subroutines. Kino-PAX is designed to align with the parallel device execution hierarchies, through ensuring that threads are largely independent, share equal workloads, and take advantage of low-latency resources while minimizing high-latency data transfers and process synchronization. This design results in a very efficient GPU implementation. We prove that Kino-PAX is probabilistically complete and analyze its scalability with compute hardware improvements. Empirical evaluations demonstrate solutions in the order of 10 ms on a desktop GPU and in the order of 100 ms on an embedded GPU, representing up to 1000 times improvement compared to coarse-grained CPU parallelization of state-of-the-art sequential algorithms over a range of complex environments and systems.

Robowflex is a software library for robot motion planning in industrial and research applications, leveraging the popular MoveIt library and Robot Operating System (ROS) middleware. Robowflex provides an augmented API for crafting and manipulating motion planning queries within a single program, making motion planning with MoveIt easy. Robowflex's high-level API simplifies many common use-cases while still providing low-level access to the MoveIt library when needed. Robowflex is particularly useful for 1) developing new motion planners, 2) evaluating motion planners, and 3) complex problems that use motion planning as a subroutine (e.g., task and motion planning). Robowflex also provides visualization capabilities, integrations to other robotics libraries (e.g., DART and Tesseract), and is complementary to other robotics packages. With our library, the user does not need to be an expert at ROS or MoveIt to set up motion planning queries, extract information from results, and directly interface with a variety of software components. We demonstrate its efficacy through several example use-cases.

Engineers at Rice University have developed a method that allows humans to help robots "see" their environments and carry out tasks. The strategy called Bayesian Learning IN the Dark -- BLIND, for short -- is a novel solution to the long-standing problem of motion planning for robots that work in environments where not everything is clearly visible all the time. The peer-reviewed study led by computer scientists Lydia Kavraki and Vaibhav Unhelkar and co-lead authors Carlos Quintero-Peña and Constantinos Chamzas of Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering was presented at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' International Conference on Robotics and Automation in late May. The algorithm developed primarily by Quintero-Peña and Chamzas, both graduate students working with Kavraki, keeps a human in the loop to "augment robot perception and, importantly, prevent the execution of unsafe motion," according to the study. To do so, they combined Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning (by which a system learns from continually updated information and experience) with established motion planning techniques to assist robots that have "high degrees of freedom" -- that is, a lot of moving parts.

By Mike Williams When you take a medication, you want to know precisely what it does. Pharmaceutical companies go through extensive testing to ensure that you do. With a new deep learning-based technique created at Rice University's Brown School of Engineering, they may soon get a better handle on how drugs in development will perform in the human body. Lydia Kavraki, Professor of Computer Science, has introduced Metabolite Translator, a computational tool that predicts metabolites, the products of interactions between small molecules like drugs and enzymes. The Rice researchers take advantage of deep-learning methods and the availability of massive reaction datasets to give developers a broad picture of what a drug will do.

When you take a medication, you want to know precisely what it does. Pharmaceutical companies go through extensive testing to ensure that you do. With a new deep learning-based technique created at Rice University's Brown School of Engineering, they may soon get a better handle on how drugs in development will perform in the human body. The Rice lab of computer scientist Lydia Kavraki has introduced Metabolite Translator, a computational tool that predicts metabolites, the products of interactions between small molecules like drugs and enzymes. The Rice researchers take advantage of deep-learning methods and the availability of massive reaction datasets to give developers a broad picture of what a drug will do.

When you take a medication, you want to know precisely what it does. Pharmaceutical companies go through extensive testing to ensure that you do. With a new deep learning-based technique created at Rice University's Brown School of Engineering, they may soon get a better handle on how drugs in development will perform in the human body. The Rice lab of computer scientist Lydia Kavraki has introduced Metabolite Translator, a computational tool that predicts metabolites, the products of interactions between small molecules like drugs and enzymes. The Rice researchers take advantage of deep-learning methods and the availability of massive reaction datasets to give developers a broad picture of what a drug will do.

A team led by computer scientist Lydia Kavraki used a machine learning approach to predict the quality of scaffold materials produced by 3D-printing, given the printing parameters. The work also found that controlling print speed is critical in making high-quality implants. Bioscaffolds developed by co-author and bioengineer Antonios Mikos are bonelike structures that serve as placeholders for injured tissue. They are porous to support the growth of cells and blood vessels that turn into new tissue and ultimately replace the implant. Mikos has been developing bioscaffolds to improve techniques to heal craniofacial and musculoskeletal wounds.

More than fifty years of research in molecular biology have demonstrated that the ability of small and large molecules to interact with one another and propagate the cellular processes in the living cell lies in the ability of these molecules to assume and switch between specific structures under physiological conditions. Elucidating biomolecular structure and dynamics at equilibrium is therefore fundamental to furthering our understanding of biological function, molecular mechanisms in the cell, our own biology, disease, and disease treatments. By now, there is a wealth of methods designed to elucidate biomolecular structure and dynamics contributed from diverse scientific communities. In this survey, we focus on recent methods contributed from the Robotics community that promise to address outstanding challenges regarding the disparate length and time scales that characterize dynamic molecular processes in the cell. In particular, we survey robotics-inspired methods designed to obtain efficient representations of structure spaces of molecules in isolation or in assemblies for the purpose of characterizing equilibrium structure and dynamics. While an exhaustive review is an impossible endeavor, this survey balances the description of important algorithmic contributions with a critical discussion of outstanding computational challenges. The objective is to spur further research to address outstanding challenges in modeling equilibrium biomolecular structure and dynamics.