Reactive Robot-Centric Safety for Autonomous Navigation in Constrained and Dynamic Environments

Engineering notes

This framework is applicable to various robotic applications, especially in environments with dynamic factors such as underground inspections. It provides engineers with tools to enhance the safety of autonomous navigation systems.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

本文提出了一种实时控制架构，通过结合3D激光雷达感知和复合控制屏障函数，实现了自主机器人在空间受限和动态环境中的安全导航。该框架能够动态处理碰撞避免约束，同时对原有任务执行的干扰最小化。

Original abstract

In this work, we address the problem of ensuring real-time safety in autonomous robot navigation, in spatially constrained dynamic environments, by utilizing only onboard sensors. We present a real-time control architecture that integrates a 3D LIDAR perception-based composite control barrier function(CBF)-based safety filter directly into the autonomy pipeline. The proposed perception-driven framework enforces collision avoidance constraints dynamically from onboard point cloud data, thus allowing a large number of constraints to be handled at the control frequency, while remaining minimally invasive to nominal task execution. The safety region is defined as an ellipsoid in the body-frame, consistent with the geometry of the platform, which induces time-varying constraints in the world frame as the robot rotates; this effect is handled through a dedicated formulation of time-varying (CBF) for each LIDAR point. We validate the system through multiple field experiments in underground environments by utilizing a quadruped platform performing a visual inspection task, demonstrating reliable operation in the presence of dynamic obstacles, unsafe high-level references, abrupt localization anomalies, and while traversing through narrow corridors.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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