2022/03/05 by Michael Hibbard, Hibbard, Michael, Abraham P. Vinod +5 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Formal Methods in Verification #Reinforcement Learning in Robotics #Robotic Path Planning Algorithms #Robotics (cs.RO) #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.02816
openalex publication_date 2022/03/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Consider a robot operating in an uncertain environment with stochastic, dynamic obstacles. Despite the clear benefits for trajectory optimization, it is often hard to keep track of each obstacle at every time step due to sensing and hardware limitations. We introduce the Safely motion planner, a receding-horizon control framework, that simultaneously synthesizes both a trajectory for the robot to follow as well as a sensor selection strategy that prescribes trajectory-relevant obstacles to measure at each time step while respecting the sensing constraints of the robot. We perform the motion planning using sequential quadratic programming, and prescribe obstacles to sense based on the duality information associated with the convex subproblems. We guarantee safety by ensuring that the probability of the robot colliding with any of the obstacles is below a prescribed threshold at every time step of the planned robot trajectory. We demonstrate the efficacy of the Safely motion planner through software and hardware experiments.