Neural Motion Planning approach helps robots navigate challenging obstacles in unfamiliar environments

Humans can grab a book from a shelf with little obvious thought. But it's a complex process for the brain that involves planning and navigating around obstacles, like other books or knickknacks. Robotics researchers have struggled to replicate this kind of human movement when their systems perform similar tasks. Known as motion planning, the process of training a robot to get an object from one point to another without hitting any obstacles takes time and resources because the robot can't react dynamically like humans in unknown environments.