Safe Stabilizing Control for Polygonal Robots in Dynamic Elliptical Environments

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel control barrier function approach for safe navigation of polygon-shaped robots in dynamic environments, enabling real-time obstacle avoidance with complex geometries.

Contribution

It introduces an analytic method to compute distances between polygons and ellipses, allowing CBF design for complex robot and obstacle shapes, extending beyond point or circular models.

Findings

Effective real-time obstacle avoidance demonstrated in simulations

Applicable to both mobile robots and multi-joint robot arms

Enables safe navigation with complex geometries in dynamic environments

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenge of safe navigation for rigid-body mobile robots in dynamic environments. We introduce an analytic approach to compute the distance between a polygon and an ellipse, and employ it to construct a control barrier function (CBF) for safe control synthesis. Existing CBF design methods for mobile robot obstacle avoidance usually assume point or circular robots, preventing their applicability to more realistic robot body geometries. Our work enables CBF designs that capture complex robot and obstacle shapes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in simulations highlighting real-time obstacle avoidance in constrained and dynamic environments for both mobile robots and multi-joint robot arms.