English

RCSP: Risk-Sensitive Conjectural Scenario Planning for Safe Dynamic Robot Navigation

Robotics 2026-05-27 v1

Abstract

Mobile robots can fail before they collide: a velocity that is safe now may commit the robot to a passage that moving obstacles will soon close. We study this predictive near-miss commitment problem and propose Risk-Sensitive Conjectural Scenario Planning (RCSP), a planning layer that evaluates candidate commands against plausible short-horizon obstacle futures. RCSP maintains a lightweight belief over local motion conjectures, samples future interactions, penalizes high-risk tails, and executes through a local safety check. In controlled MuJoCo bottleneck tasks, the RCSP planner reaches the goal without collisions and yields higher secondary safety and path-quality point estimates than a non-adaptive predictor, with additional latency. In ROS2/Gazebo, adding the local safety layer to a standard Nav2 stack reduces dynamic near-miss failures. On official DynaBARN/Jackal transfer, tuned DWA and TEB remain stronger on strict benchmark success, revealing the boundary of the approach. These simulation results position RCSP as a predictive-risk module that complements existing navigation stacks in dynamic bottleneck regimes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.26348,
  title  = {RCSP: Risk-Sensitive Conjectural Scenario Planning for Safe Dynamic Robot Navigation},
  author = {Zhengye Han and Quanyan Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26348},
  year   = {2026}
}