Natural Functional Gradients for Smooth Trajectory Optimization
Generating collision-free and smooth motions remains a central challenge in robotic manipulation, particularly in cluttered environments and narrow passages where feasible regions are highly constrained and fragmented. We propose a trajectory optimization framework that performs geometry-aware updates directly in function space using natural functional gradients. The method optimizes a Gaussian-smoothed surrogate objective that regularizes the optimization landscape through smooth trajectory perturbations while preserving trajectory-level structure. Because the updates are defined intrinsically in function space, trajectory regularity can be controlled independently of a particular time discretization. We derive a practical Monte-Carlo estimator of the natural functional gradient that requires only black-box trajectory evaluations, making the method applicable when analytic gradients are unavailable or unreliable due to collision checking and contact-rich simulation. Experiments on constrained robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that the proposed method improves trajectory feasibility and produces smoother motions than representative planning and trajectory optimization baselines in environments with narrow geometric clearances. Additional results, videos, and implementation details are available at the project page: https://kisangpark.github.io/natural-functional-gradient/
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Nonsmooth Projection-Free Optimization with Functional Constraints
This paper presents a subgradient-based algorithm for constrained nonsmooth convex optimization that does not require projections onto the feasible set. While the well-established Frank-Wolfe algorithm and its variants a…
Functional Gradient Descent with Adaptive Representations
Functional optimization problems are typically solved by optimizing the parameters of a fixed representation, such as a neural network, resulting in highly nonconvex losses that complicate both training and theoretical a…
Gradient-Variation Online Learning under Generalized Smoothness
Gradient-variation online learning aims to achieve regret guarantees that scale with variations in the gradients of online functions, which has been shown to be crucial for attaining fast convergence in games and robustn…
Stochastic OptimizationConvergence of Adam Under Relaxed Assumptions
In this paper, we provide a rigorous proof of convergence of the Adaptive Moment Estimate (Adam) algorithm for a wide class of optimization objectives. Despite the popularity and efficiency of the Adam algorithm in train…
Convex and Non-convex Optimization Under Generalized Smoothness
Classical analysis of convex and non-convex optimization methods often requires the Lipshitzness of the gradient, which limits the analysis to functions bounded by quadratics. Recent work relaxed this requirement to a no…