RIT*: Riemannian Informed Trees for Cost-Adaptive Optimal Motion Planning

Abstract

We present Riemannian Informed Trees (RIT*), a planning framework that replaces Euclidean primitives in batch-informed search with their Riemannian counterparts. RIT* constructs a tighter, cost-consistent informed set, performs a nearest-neighbour search under an anisotropic distance metric, and evaluates edge costs efficiently via a cascading scheme. We further introduce a Collision-Adaptive Metric Refinement (CARM), which learns an obstacle-proximity cost field online from collision feedback, reducing the reliance on prior metric design in practical settings. Experiments across environments from 2-D to 14-D show that RIT* is competitive in low-dimensional and spatially constant-metric settings and produces substantially lower-cost solutions when the metric varies spatially in high-dimensional configuration spaces. Performance gains scale with anisotropy and dimension, reaching up to 13.0% improvement in median initial cost over BIT* in the 3-D anisotropic benchmark, up to 9.0% in median final cost over BIT* in 6-DOF manipulation, and 24.8-63.5% in a 14-DOF bimanual planning problem, where Euclidean-informed baselines degrade. Videos and code can be found here: https://muhayyuddin.github.io/ritstar/