Safe Model Predictive Diffusion with Shielding

Safe MPD teaser

Abstract: Generating safe, kinodynamically feasible, and optimal trajectories for complex robotic systems is a central challenge in robotics. This paper presents Safe Model Predictive Diffusion (Safe MPD), a training-free diffusion planner that unifies a model-based diffusion framework with a safety shield to generate trajectories that are both kinodynamically feasible and safe by construction. By enforcing feasibility and safety on all samples during the denoising process, our method avoids the common pitfalls of post-processing corrections, such as computational intractability and loss of feasibility. We validate our approach on challenging non-convex planning problems, including kinematic and acceleration-controlled tractor-trailer systems. Through parallelization on GPU, our method achieves sub-second planning times even on challenging, non-convex problems.




Publication
ICRA'26

Safe Model Predictive Diffusion with Shielding

T. Kim, K. Majd, H. Okamoto, B. Hoxha, D. Panagou, G. Fainekos

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026. BibTex