Control Barrier Functions in UGVs for Kinematic Obstacle Avoidance: A Collision Cone Approach

Understand

In this paper, we propose a new class of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) that help avoid collisions with kinematic (non-zero velocity) obstacles.

• While the current forms of CBFs have been successful in guaranteeing safety/collision avoidance with static obstacles, extensions for the dynamic case have seen limited success.
• Moreover, with the UGV models like the unicycle or the bicycle, applications of existing CBFs have been conservative in terms of control, i.e., steering/thrust control has not been possible under certain scenarios.
• Drawing inspiration from the classical use of collision cones for obstacle avoidance in trajectory planning, we introduce its novel CBF formulation with theoretical guarantees on safety for both the unicycle and bicycle models.