Recently, there has been increasing attention in robot research towards the whole-body collision avoidance. In this paper, we propose a safety-critical controller that utilizes time-varying control barrier functions (time varying CBFs) constructed by Robo-centric Euclidean Signed Distance Field (RC-ESDF) to achieve dynamic collision avoidance. The RC-ESDF is constructed in the robot body frame and solely relies on the robot's shape, eliminating the need for real-time updates to save computational resources. Additionally, we design two control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) to ensure that the robot can reach its destination. To enable real-time application, our safety-critical controller which incorporates CLFs and CBFs as constraints is formulated as a quadratic program (QP) optimization problem. We conducted numerical simulations on two different dynamics of an L-shaped robot to verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
@article{arxiv.2311.18212,
title = {Whole-body Dynamic Collision Avoidance with Time-varying Control Barrier Functions},
author = {Jihao Huang and Xuemin Chi and Zhitao Liu and Hongye Su},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.18212},
year = {2023}
}