2025/11/19 by Feng, Mingyang, Li, Shaoyuan, Yin, Xiang
Computer Science · Engineering · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Reinforcement Learning in Robotics #Robot Manipulation and Learning #Robotic Path Planning Algorithms #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.15414
openalex publication_date 2025/11/19 · openalex created_date 2025/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate the sampling-based optimal path planning problem for robotics in complex and dynamic environments. Most existing sampling-based algorithms neglect environmental information or the information from previous samples. Yet, these pieces of information are highly informative, as leveraging them can provide better heuristics when sampling the next state. In this paper, we propose a novel sampling-based planning algorithm, called RRT*former, which integrates the standard RRT* algorithm with a Transformer network in a novel way. Specifically, the Transformer is used to extract features from the environment and leverage information from previous samples to better guide the sampling process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared to existing sampling-based approaches such as RRT*, Neural RRT*, and their variants, our algorithm achieves considerable improvements in both the optimality of the path and sampling efficiency. The code for our implementation is available on https://github.com/fengmingyang666/RRTformer.