Collision Avoidance Control for a Two-wheeled Vehicle under Stochastic Vibration using an Almost Sure Control Barrier Function

TL;DR

This paper introduces a safety-critical control law for a two-wheeled vehicle that guarantees collision avoidance with probability one under stochastic vibrations, validated through experiments.

Contribution

It develops an almost sure safety control method using stochastic control barrier functions tailored for two-wheeled robots under irregular disturbances.

Findings

The control law ensures safety with probability one.

Experimental validation confirms effectiveness under vibration disturbances.

The approach incorporates 2D LiDAR measurements for system modeling.

Abstract

In recent years, many control problems of autonomous mobile robots have been developed. In particular, the robots are required to be safe; that is, they need to be controlled to avoid colliding with people or objects while traveling. In addition, since safety should be ensured even under irregular disturbances, the control for safety is required to be effective for stochastic systems. In this study, we design an almost sure safety-critical control law, which ensures safety with probability one, for a two-wheeled vehicle based on the stochastic control barrier function approach. In the procedure, we also consider a system model using the relative distance measured by a 2D LiDAR. The validity of the proposed control scheme is confirmed by experiments of a collision avoidance problem for a two-wheeled vehicle under vibration.