From Prediction Uncertainty to Conformalized Distance Fields for Safe Motion Planning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00776v1
• Date: Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:02:51 GMT
• Title: From Prediction Uncertainty to Conformalized Distance Fields for Safe Motion Planning
• Abstract summary: Existing conformal approaches conformalize a scalar score that aggregates per-obstacle prediction errors.<n>We instead conformalize the entire predicted distance field at once.<n>This functional conformal prediction framework yields a distribution-free, field-level lower bound.
• Score: 9.50741434664352
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Safe motion planning in dynamic environments requires reasoning about the uncertainty in predicted obstacle motion without sacrificing real-time performance. Existing conformal approaches conformalize a scalar score that aggregates per-obstacle prediction errors, losing spatial coherence and scaling poorly with scene density. We instead conformalize the entire predicted distance field at once. This functional conformal prediction (FCP) framework yields a distribution-free, field-level lower bound, from which safety follows uniformly: any trajectory satisfying the resulting constraint is certified safe, independent of how the control space is sampled. The key enabler is that the residual distance field is empirically low-rank and approximately time-invariant, which makes the bound decomposable in coefficient space. An envelope is fitted offline via functional PCA and a Gaussian-mixture inductive conformal procedure, then refined online by a lightweight adaptive functional conformal (AFCP) update on a low-dimensional vector. This keeps the per-step cost largely insensitive to obstacle count and retains long-run field coverage under distribution shift. We embed the envelope as a tightened safety constraint in a sampling-based model predictive controller, FCP-MPC. On the ETH--UCY pedestrian benchmarks and a dense 3D quadrotor task with up to 280 dynamic obstacles, FCP-MPC attains a favorable balance of safety, feasibility, and efficiency, reaching goals where pointwise and egocentric conformal baselines become too conservative or too expensive, while keeping per-step computation far below online uncertainty-reasoning baselines.

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