Accelerating Robot Path Planning via Connectivity-Preserving Region Proposal Network

Abstract

Mobile robot path planning methods are often constrained by vast search spaces, resulting in latency in samplingbased algorithms. Learning-based approaches frequently suffer from local region fragmentation and global topological inconsistency. To tackle the problem, we present the Connectivity- Preserving Region Proposal Network (CP-RPN), a segmentationguided model designed to predict compact and topologically connected candidate regions, significantly compressing the search space. Specifically, we design a segmentation model that leverages a Deformable Attention Transformer (DAT) to capture long-range dependencies for global connectivity, with a Deconvolutional decoder to preserve fine-grained spatial details. To guarantee the connectivity of the predicted mask, we design a composite loss function that combines Cross-Entropy loss for pixelwise supervision, a Connectivity-Aware loss to enhance local coherence, and a Topological Continuity loss based on persistent homology to enforce global connectivity. Building on these highconnectivity corridor-like regions, the Voronoi diagram is used to plan the path, backed by a local A* fallback mechanism to ensure robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that CPRPN reduces the candidate region size by over 60.13% compared to the MPT baseline and achieves deterministic low-latency planning (avg. 0.11s) with a 99.60% success rate, outperforming traditional sampling-based algorithms in stability.