Control Transformer: Robot Navigation in Unknown Environments through PRM-Guided Return-Conditioned Sequence Modeling

Learning long-horizon tasks such as navigation has presented difficult challenges for successfully applying reinforcement learning. However, from another perspective, under a known environment model, methods such as sampling-based planning can robustly find collision-free paths in environments without learning. In this work, we propose Control Transformer which models return-conditioned sequences from low-level policies guided by a sampling-based Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) planner. Once trained, we demonstrate that our framework can solve long-horizon navigation tasks using only local information. We evaluate our approach on partially-observed maze navigation with MuJoCo robots, including Ant, Point, and Humanoid, and show that Control Transformer can successfully navigate large mazes and generalize to new, unknown environments. Additionally, we apply our method to a differential drive robot (Turtlebot3) and show zero-shot sim2real transfer under noisy observations.