Robo-centric ESDF: A Fast and Accurate Whole-body Collision Evaluation Tool for Any-shape Robotic Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, accurate, and generalizable collision evaluation tool called Robo-centric ESDF (RC-ESDF) for any-shape mobile robots, enabling efficient trajectory optimization in complex environments.

Contribution

The paper presents RC-ESDF, a novel pre-built, lazy collision evaluation method that works for any-shape robots and improves speed and accuracy in trajectory planning.

Findings

RC-ESDF significantly speeds up collision evaluation.

The method maintains high accuracy for non-convex and complex-shaped robots.

Experiments demonstrate reliability and applicability in real-world scenarios.

Abstract

For letting mobile robots travel flexibly through complicated environments, increasing attention has been paid to the whole-body collision evaluation. Most existing works either opt for the conservative corridor-based methods that impose strict requirements on the corridor generation, or ESDF-based methods that suffer from high computational overhead. It is still a great challenge to achieve fast and accurate whole-body collision evaluation. In this paper, we propose a Robo-centric ESDF (RC-ESDF) that is pre-built in the robot body frame and is capable of seamlessly applied to any-shape mobile robots, even for those with non-convex shapes. RC-ESDF enjoys lazy collision evaluation, which retains only the minimum information sufficient for whole-body safety constraint and significantly speeds up trajectory optimization. Based on the analytical gradients provided by RC-ESDF, we optimize the position and rotation of robot jointly, with whole-body safety, smoothness, and dynamical feasibility taken into account. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments verified the reliability and generalizability of our method.