Warm-Starting Collision-Free Model Predictive Control With Object-Centric Diffusion

Acting in cluttered environments requires predicting and avoiding collisions while still achieving precise control. Conventional optimization-based controllers can enforce physical constraints, but they struggle to produce feasible solutions quickly when many obstacles are present. Diffusion models can generate diverse trajectories around obstacles, yet prior approaches lacked a general and efficient way to condition them on scene structure. In this paper, we show that combining diffusion-based warm-starting conditioned with a latent object-centric representation of the scene and with a collision-aware model predictive controller (MPC) yields reliable and efficient motion generation under strict time limits. Our approach conditions a diffusion transformer on the system state, task, and surroundings, using an object-centric slot attention mechanism to provide a compact obstacle representation suitable for control. The sampled trajectories are refined by an optimal control problem that enforces rigid-body dynamics and signed-distance collision constraints, producing feasible motions in real time. On benchmark tasks, this hybrid method achieved markedly higher success rates and lower latency than sampling-based planners or either component alone. Real-robot experiments with a torque-controlled Panda confirm reliable and safe execution with MPC.

Infinite-Horizon Value Function Approximation for Model Predictive Control

Model Predictive Control has emerged as a popular tool for robots to generate complex motions. However, the real-time requirement has limited the use of hard constraints and large preview horizons, which are necessary to ensure safety and stability. In practice, practitioners have to carefully design cost functions that can imitate an infinite horizon formulation, which is tedious and often results in local minima. In this work, we study how to approximate the infinite horizon value function of constrained optimal control problems with neural networks using value iteration and trajectory optimization. Furthermore, we demonstrate how using this value function approximation as a terminal cost provides global stability to the model predictive controller. The approach is validated on two toy problems and a real-world scenario with online obstacle avoidance on an industrial manipulator where the value function is conditioned to the goal and obstacle.