Related papers: Geometry-Aware Safety-Critical Local Reactive Cont…
The design process and complexity of existing safety controls are heavily determined by the geometrical properties of the environment, which affects the proof of convergence, design scalability, performance robustness, and numerical…
Local navigation is one of the fundamental problems in robot navigation, and numerous approaches have been proposed over the years, including methods such as the Dynamic Window Approach, Model Predictive Control, and more recently, Control…
In this paper, we consider the problem of using a robot to explore an environment with an unknown, state-dependent disturbance function while avoiding some forbidden areas. The goal of the robot is to safely collect observations of the…
Convex optimization is crucial in controlling legged robots, where stability and optimal control are vital. Many control problems can be formulated as convex optimization problems, with a convex cost function and constraints capturing…
Balancing safety and efficiency when planning in crowded scenarios with uncertain dynamics is challenging where it is imperative to accomplish the robot's mission without incurring any safety violations. Typically, chance constraints are…
Safe autonomous navigation in unknown environments is an important problem for mobile robots. This paper proposes techniques to learn the dynamics model of a mobile robot from trajectory data and synthesize a tracking controller with safety…
Robotic navigation in unknown, cluttered environments with limited sensing capabilities poses significant challenges in robotics. Local trajectory optimization methods, such as Model Predictive Path Intergal (MPPI), are a promising solution…
Autonomous robots that are capable of operating safely in the presence of imperfect model knowledge or external disturbances are vital in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we present a planner-agnostic framework to design and…
This paper considers the problem of robot motion planning in a workspace with obstacles for systems with uncertain 2nd-order dynamics. In particular, we combine closed form potential-based feedback controllers with adaptive control…
Navigating robots safely and efficiently in crowded and complex environments remains a significant challenge. However, due to the dynamic and intricate nature of these settings, planning efficient and collision-free paths for robots to…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
This technical report presents the construction and analysis of polynomial navigation functions for motion planning in 3-D workspaces populated by spherical and cylindrical obstacles. The workspace is modeled as a bounded spherical region,…
We revisit the Safety Velocity Cones (SVCs) obstacle avoidance approach for real-time autonomous navigation in an unknown $n$-dimensional environment. We propose a locally Lipschitz continuous implementation of the SVC controller using the…
Many practical applications of robotics require systems that can operate safely despite uncertainty. In the context of motion planning, two types of uncertainty are particularly important when planning safe robot trajectories. The first is…
Convex free regions provide a structured and optimization-friendly representation of collision-free space for robot navigation in unknown and cluttered environments. However, existing methods typically enlarge local collision-free regions…
Planning problems are hard, motion planning, for example, isPSPACE-hard. Such problems are even more difficult in the presence of uncertainty. Although, Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) provide a formal framework for such problems, finding…
This work is dedicated to the study of how uncertainty estimation of the human motion prediction can be embedded into constrained optimization techniques, such as Model Predictive Control (MPC) for the social robot navigation. We propose…
Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…
This work proposes a novel transformation termed the conformal navigation transformation to achieve collision-free navigation of a robot in a workspace populated with arbitrary polygonal obstacles. The properties of the conformal navigation…
Safe autonomous navigation in a priori unknown environments is an essential skill for mobile robots to reliably and adaptively perform diverse tasks (e.g., delivery, inspection, and interaction) in unstructured cluttered environments.…