OGM-CBF: Occupancy Grid Map-based Control Barrier Function for Safe Mobile Robot Control with Memory of out of View Obstacles
This work tackles the practical problem of safe navigation in unknown environments for mobile robots, where obstacles may leave the field of view, by incorporating obstacle memory into CBFs.
The paper introduces OGM-CBF, a method that integrates memory of previously observed obstacles into Control Barrier Functions for safe mobile robot navigation, addressing safety violations due to limited field of view. The approach is validated in simulation and on real robots, showing improved safety over memory-unaware baselines.
Safe control in unknown environments is a key challenge in mobile robotics. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide a principled framework for guaranteeing safety constraint satisfaction. State-of-the-art CBF approaches assume either known environments with predefined obstacles, or rely only on obstacles currently within the robot's Field of View (FoV). However, practical robots in a priori unknown environments can observe their surroundings only partially, and therefore can violate safety due to limited FoV, sensor range, or occlusion. This paper incorporates the memory of a priori observed obstacles of arbitrary shape that have left the robot's FoV into the CBF safe control. In particular, we couple the Signed Distance Function (SDF)-based CBF formulation to an occupancy grid map built online during the system's operation. Furthermore, the lack of steering authority induced by the SDF gradient degeneracy when facing obstacles head-on is addressed by employing image pyramid over the SDF, yielding a multi-level CBF. The efficacy of the proposed approach is evaluated against memory unaware baselines in the CARLA simulator. Moreover, we demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed approach in real deployments on a small warehouse robot and a large, articulated frame steering autonomous wheel loader.