Approximating High Dimensional Self-Motion Manifolds via Deep Generative Models

Self-motion manifold (SMM) characterizes the geometric structure of the infinite inverse kinematic solutions set of a redundant manipulator at a fixed end-effector pose, and its efficient recovery underpins feasible and global optimal motion planning. Existing methods such as null-space continuation and learning-based methods are formulated around the assumption that an SMM is a curve, and do not extend to higher redundancy orders. We instead adopt a probabilistic view: SMMs are the support of the conditional posterior over configurations given a target pose, so that recovering it reduces to sampling from a learned distribution and separating its disjoint components by clustering. The formulation is independent of the manifold dimension and requires no architectural change as the redundancy order grows. In this work, we demonstrate that our method can approximate 1-D SMMs with performance comparable to the latest null-space continuation and learning-based approach, and that it is the first method capable of approximating highly redundant 4-D SMMs in a 7R manipulator for position tasks. Project website: https://github.com/accuracy-maker/high-dimenstional-self-motion-manifold-approximation