Reactive Robot-Centric Safety for Autonomous Navigation in Constrained and Dynamic Environments

2026-05-15

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of real-time safe autonomous navigation in spatially constrained and dynamically changing environments by proposing a real-time control architecture integrated with 3D LiDAR perception. The approach introduces an ellipsoidal safety region aligned with the robot’s body geometry, which rotates with the robot’s pose in the world frame to generate time-varying obstacle avoidance constraints. A dedicated time-varying Control Barrier Function (CBF) is designed for each LiDAR point, enabling efficient handling of numerous constraints at control frequency while minimally interfering with the primary navigation task. Extensive field experiments on a quadrupedal robot demonstrate robust performance in complex scenarios such as narrow underground corridors, where the system reliably copes with dynamic obstacles, unreliable high-level commands, and abrupt localization shifts, thereby validating its high reliability and practicality.

Abstract

In this work, we address the problem of ensuring real-time safety in autonomous robot navigation, in spatially constrained dynamic environments, by utilizing only onboard sensors. We present a real-time control architecture that integrates a 3D LIDAR perception-based composite control barrier function(CBF)-based safety filter directly into the autonomy pipeline. The proposed perception-driven framework enforces collision avoidance constraints dynamically from onboard point cloud data, thus allowing a large number of constraints to be handled at the control frequency, while remaining minimally invasive to nominal task execution. The safety region is defined as an ellipsoid in the body-frame, consistent with the geometry of the platform, which induces time-varying constraints in the world frame as the robot rotates; this effect is handled through a dedicated formulation of time-varying (CBF) for each LIDAR point. We validate the system through multiple field experiments in underground environments by utilizing a quadruped platform performing a visual inspection task, demonstrating reliable operation in the presence of dynamic obstacles, unsafe high-level references, abrupt localization anomalies, and while traversing through narrow corridors.

Problem

• autonomous navigation
• real-time safety
• constrained environments
• dynamic environments
• onboard sensors

Innovation

• control barrier function
• real-time safety
• 3D LIDAR perception
• time-varying constraints
• robot-centric ellipsoidal safety region