Learning Material-Aware Hamiltonian Risk Fields for Safe Navigation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a risk-aware navigation method that activates evasive maneuvers only when lower-risk routes are feasible, using a context-energy term and CVaR optimization to improve safety and success across various environments.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Hamiltonian risk field approach with a context-energy term and CVaR objective, enabling selective and route-aware evasive actions in navigation policies.

Findings

Reduces premature force activation from 0.950 to 0.180 in benchmarks.

Achieves success rate increase from 0.480 to 0.810 in delayed-required-escape benchmark.

Drops collisions from 100% to 0% when a lane escape is feasible.

Abstract

Risk-aware navigation should be selective: a policy should expose evasive degrees of freedom only when the local scene admits a lower-risk feasible maneuver, and suppress them when no safer alternative exists. We show that adding one context-energy term to a port-Hamiltonian navigation policy produces a learned force channel with exactly this falsifiable signature. When the local risk field contains a feasible lower-risk direction, the induced context force activates toward it; when the apparent escape is blocked or not yet available, a route-aware gate suppresses lateral force rather than hallucinating an unsafe maneuver. A CVaR tail-risk objective focuses gradient updates on rare but consequential risk transitions. We validate the selectivity signature across four settings. In the primary delayed-required-escape benchmark, route-aware CVaR reduces premature force activation from 0.950 to 0.180 versus DWA while raising success from 0.480 to 0.810 with zero replans. On real off-road terrain (RELLIS-3D), route-aware enrichment achieves correct activation rate 0.837 and false activation rate 0.114, compared to 0.378/0.752 for scalar risk gradients. On static semantic maps (DFC2018), enrichment reduces catastrophic failure from 0.60 to 0.10 and oscillation by 90.7% while preserving path efficiency. In highway traffic, collisions drop from 100% to 0% when a lane escape is feasible; when no escape exists, the policy suppresses the lateral maneuver. The selectivity property follows from the gradient structure of the context energy rather than from training-time tuning.