Efficient and Guaranteed-Safe Non-Convex Trajectory Optimization with Constrained Diffusion Model

Trajectory optimization in robotics poses a challenging non-convex problem due to complex dynamics and environmental settings. Traditional numerical optimization methods are time-consuming in finding feasible solutions, whereas data-driven approaches lack safety guarantees for the output trajectories. In this paper, we introduce a general and fully parallelizable framework that combines diffusion models and numerical solvers for non-convex trajectory optimization, ensuring both computational efficiency and constraint satisfaction. A novel constrained diffusion model is proposed with an additional constraint violation loss for training. It aims to approximate the distribution of locally optimal solutions while minimizing constraint violations during sampling. The samples are then used as initial guesses for a numerical solver to refine and derive final solutions with formal verification of feasibility and optimality. Experimental evaluations on three tasks over different robotics domains verify the improved constraint satisfaction and computational efficiency with 4 to 22 acceleration using our proposed method, which generalizes across trajectory optimization problems and scales well with problem complexity.