A Real-Time Control Barrier Function-Based Safety Filter for Motion Planning with Arbitrary Road Boundary Constraints

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time safety filter for motion planning that uses Control Barrier Functions to ensure collision avoidance with complex road boundaries, applicable to learning-based systems, and validated through extensive experiments.

Contribution

The approach directly incorporates arbitrary-shaped road geometries into a safety filter using CBFs without conservative approximations, formulated as a fast quadratic program.

Findings

Achieves safety with minimal control adjustments

Operates at up to 40 Hz in complex scenarios

Demonstrates reliable safety and efficiency

Abstract

We present a real-time safety filter for motion planning, including those that are learning-based, using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to provide formal guarantees for collision avoidance with road boundaries. A key feature of our approach is its ability to directly incorporate road geometries of arbitrary shape that are represented as polylines without resorting to conservative overapproximations. We formulate the safety filter as a constrained optimization problem as a Quadratic Program (QP), which achieves safety by making minimal, necessary adjustments to the control actions issued by the nominal motion planner. We validate our safety filter through extensive numerical experiments across a variety of traffic scenarios featuring complex road boundaries. The results confirm its reliable safety and high computational efficiency (execution frequency up to 40 Hz). Code reproducing our experimental results and a video demonstration are available at github.com/bassamlab/SigmaRL.