用物理约束的高效生成模型,让机器人实时避障且推理快800倍。
PIER-Flow: Physics-Informed Efficient Rectified Flow for Real-Time Mobile Robot Navigation

- 将MPC专家知识转为连续微分方程,单步生成动作
- 仿真中成功率98.85%、零碰撞,平均推理1.29毫秒
- 适合边缘设备部署,实测延迟稳定在5.3毫秒
在密集动态环境中实现自主导航需兼顾物理可行性与低延迟重规划。基于优化的方法如模型预测控制(MPC)虽能显式处理运动学和安全约束,但重复非线性优化限制了实时响应。确定性行为克隆策略推理高效,却难以表示多模态避障行为;扩散策略虽能捕捉多模态,但依赖耗时的迭代去噪。本文提出PIER-Flow(物理信息高效的修正流),一种轻量级移动机器人导航策略。通过将MPC专家知识蒸馏为连续时间常微分方程(ODE),实现并行潜在采样与轻量可行性筛选的单步动作生成。引入物理信息训练目标以保证运动一致性,并采用异步动作分块架构提升仿真到现实的鲁棒性。大量仿真实验表明,PIER-Flow达成98.85%成功率与零碰撞,平均推理时间约1.29毫秒,相比MPC提速37.2倍,较标准扩散模型超800倍。关键的是,在资源受限的边缘计算设备上真实部署,推理延迟稳定在约5.3毫秒,避免了基线方法的延迟突增与卡顿现象。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Autonomous navigation in dense and highly dynamic environments requires both physically feasible control and low-latency replanning. Optimization-based methods such as Model Predictive Control (MPC) explicitly handle robot kinematics and safety constraints, but repeated nonlinear optimization can limit real-time responsiveness. Deterministic behavior-cloning policies enable efficient inference but may fail to represent multimodal avoidance behaviors, whereas diffusion policies capture multimodality at the cost of time-consuming iterative denoising. We propose PIER-Flow (Physics-Informed Efficient Rectified Flow), a lightweight navigation policy for mobile robots. By distilling an MPC expert into a continuous-time Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE), PIER-Flow achieves single-step action generation through parallel latent sampling and lightweight feasibility selection. We introduce a physics-informed training objective to enforce kinematic consistency, paired with an asynchronous action chunking architecture for robust sim-to-real deployment. Extensive simulations demonstrate that PIER-Flow achieves a 98.85\% success rate and zero collisions, with an average inference of $\sim$1.29 ms, which accelerates planning by 37.2$\times$ compared to MPC and over 800$\times$ against standard diffusion models. Crucially, real-world deployment on a resource-constrained edge computer further achieves an approximately stable inference latency of $\sim$5.3 ms, avoiding the latency spikes and freezing events observed with planning baselines.
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