Technical Report: Reactive Navigation in Partially Known Non-Convex Environments
This addresses navigation challenges for robots in partially known, cluttered environments, representing an incremental extension of existing methods.
The paper tackles robot navigation in 2D environments with both familiar non-convex obstacles and unknown convex obstacles, using a provably correct reactive controller that transforms the problem into a convex planning space, with validation through formal proofs and simulations.
This paper presents a provably correct method for robot navigation in 2D environments cluttered with familiar but unexpected non-convex, star-shaped obstacles as well as completely unknown, convex obstacles. We presuppose a limited range onboard sensor, capable of recognizing, localizing and (leveraging ideas from constructive solid geometry) generating online from its catalogue of the familiar, non-convex shapes an implicit representation of each one. These representations underlie an online change of coordinates to a completely convex model planning space wherein a previously developed online construction yields a provably correct reactive controller that is pulled back to the physically sensed representation to generate the actual robot commands. We extend the construction to differential drive robots, and suggest the empirical utility of the proposed control architecture using both formal proofs and numerical simulations.