RAY-TOLD: Ray-Based Latent Dynamics for Dense Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance with TDMPC

arXiv:2604.27450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dense, dynamic crowds pose a persistent challenge for autonomous mobile robots. Purely reactive planning methods, such as Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control, often fail to escape local minima in complex scenarios due to their limited prediction horizon. To bridge this gap, we propose Ray-based Task-Oriented Latent Dynamics (RAY-TOLD), a hybrid control architecture that integrates obstacle information into latent dynamics and utilizes t