Feedback Motion Plan Verification for Vehicles with Bounded Curvature Constraints

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometric backward reachability method for verifying feedback motion plans of vehicles with bounded curvature, enabling offline trajectory validation for improved safety and reliability.

Contribution

It presents a novel geometric approach to backward reachability for verifying feedback motion plans of Dubin's vehicles, combining theoretical formulation with numerical implementation.

Findings

The method accurately computes backward reachable sets for vehicles with curvature constraints.

The approach allows offline verification of trajectories, enhancing safety.

Numerical examples demonstrate practical applicability.

Abstract

The kinematic approximation of Dubin's Vehicle has been largely exploited in the formulation of various motion planning methods. In the majority of these methods, planning and control phases are decoupled, and the burden of rejecting disturbances is left to the controller. An alternative to this approach is the use of a feedback motion plan, where for each state there is a specific pre-computed action that will be executed. This planning approach provides the ability to verify all trajectories off-line. The verification can be performed using backward reachability, which provides the set of configurations from which a region is reachable. In this paper, we formulate a verification process that relies on the computation of the backward reachable set using geometric principles. In addition to the theoretical foundation of the method, we provide a numerical implementation of the method and we illustrate a practical example.