Deep Reactive Policy: Learning Reactive Manipulator Motion Planning for Dynamic Environments

Generating collision-free motion in dynamic, partially observable environments is a fundamental challenge for robotic manipulators. Classical motion planners can compute globally optimal trajectories but require full environment knowledge and are typically too slow for dynamic scenes. Neural motion policies offer a promising alternative by operating in closed-loop directly on raw sensory inputs but often struggle to generalize in complex or dynamic settings. We propose Deep Reactive Policy (DRP), a visuo-motor neural motion policy designed for reactive motion generation in diverse dynamic environments, operating directly on point cloud sensory input. At its core is IMPACT, a transformer-based neural motion policy pretrained on 10 million generated expert trajectories across diverse simulation scenarios. We further improve IMPACT's static obstacle avoidance through iterative student-teacher finetuning. We additionally enhance the policy's dynamic obstacle avoidance at inference time using DCP-RMP, a locally reactive goal-proposal module. We evaluate DRP on challenging tasks featuring cluttered scenes, dynamic moving obstacles, and goal obstructions. DRP achieves strong generalization, outperforming prior classical and neural methods in success rate across both simulated and real-world settings. Video results and code available at https://deep-reactive-policy.com

Neural MP: A Generalist Neural Motion Planner

The current paradigm for motion planning generates solutions from scratch for every new problem, which consumes significant amounts of time and computational resources. For complex, cluttered scenes, motion planning approaches can often take minutes to produce a solution, while humans are able to accurately and safely reach any goal in seconds by leveraging their prior experience. We seek to do the same by applying data-driven learning at scale to the problem of motion planning. Our approach builds a large number of complex scenes in simulation, collects expert data from a motion planner, then distills it into a reactive generalist policy. We then combine this with lightweight optimization to obtain a safe path for real world deployment. We perform a thorough evaluation of our method on 64 motion planning tasks across four diverse environments with randomized poses, scenes and obstacles, in the real world, demonstrating an improvement of 23%, 17% and 79% motion planning success rate over state of the art sampling, optimization and learning based planning methods. Video results available at mihdalal.github.io/neuralmotionplanner