aiqbench analysis
This article introduces geodex, an open-source library designed specifically for motion planning on Riemannian manifolds, addressing a gap in existing tools that handle intrinsic geometry and obstacles simultaneously. By treating configuration-dependent metrics as the core driver for distance and geodesics, it enables more energy-efficient and natural trajectories across various robotic state spaces, from Lie groups to articulated systems.
geodex: A Library for Motion Planning on Riemannian Manifolds
arXiv:2610.09165v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Planning motions that respect the intrinsic geometry of a robot's configuration space, including its curvature and a configuration-dependent notion of cost, yields shorter, lower-energy, and more natural trajectories than planning under the ambient flat metric. Existing libraries for optimization on manifolds provide rich geometric primitives but do not plan around obstacles. While general-purpose motion planning libraries support many state spaces and custom distance functions, they do not yet treat a configuration-dependent Riemannian metric as the geometry that drives distance, interpolation, and geodesics. We present geodex, an open-source C++20 library with Python bindings. The library exposes the manifold, its Riemannian metric, the retraction, and the sampler as independent, interchangeable components through a single sampling-based motion planning interface. The same planner runs unchanged on canonical spaces $\mathbb{R}^n$, $\mathbb{T}^n$, $\mathbb{S}^n$, matrix Lie groups such as $SO(2)$, $SE(2)$, $SO(3)$, and $SE(3)$, products of these spaces, and articulated-robot configuration spaces, each equipped with a user-defined Riemannian metric. We make geodex publicly available with documentation, tests, and a reproducible benchmark suite.
Abstract:Planning motions that respect the intrinsic geometry of a robot's configuration space, including its curvature and a configuration-dependent notion of cost, yields shorter, lower-energy, and more natural trajectories than planning under the ambient flat metric. Existing libraries for optimization on manifolds provide rich geometric primitives but do not plan around obstacles. While general-purpose motion planning libraries support many state spaces and custom distance functions, they do not yet treat a configuration-dependent Riemannian metric as the geometry that drives distance, interpolation, and geodesics. We present geodex, an open-source C++20 library with Python bindings. The library exposes the manifold, its Riemannian metric, the retraction, and the sampler as independent, interchangeable components through a single sampling-based motion planning interface. The same planner runs unchanged on canonical spaces $\mathbb{R}^n$, $\mathbb{T}^n$, $\mathbb{S}^n$, matrix Lie groups such as $SO(2)$, $SE(2)$, $SO(3)$, and $SE(3)$, products of these spaces, and articulated-robot configuration spaces, each equipped with a user-defined Riemannian metric. We make geodex publicly available with documentation, tests, and a reproducible benchmark suite.
8 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables. Code, documentation, and tutorials at this https URL
Robotics (cs.RO)
arXiv:2610.09165 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2610.09165v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.09165 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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