Neural Configuration-Space Barriers for Manipulation Planning and Control
This addresses safety and efficiency challenges for robot manipulation in real-world environments, representing an incremental improvement over existing CDF-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of safe motion planning and control for robot manipulators in cluttered, dynamic environments by proposing neural configuration-space distance function (CDF) barriers that reduce collision-checking operations and account for modeling uncertainties. Results from simulations and hardware experiments on a 6-DoF xArm show the approach enables efficient planning and robust real-time safe control using only onboard point-cloud observations.
Planning and control for high-dimensional robot manipulators in cluttered, dynamic environments require both computational efficiency and robust safety guarantees. Inspired by recent advances in learning configuration-space distance functions (CDFs) as robot body representations, we propose a unified framework for motion planning and control that formulates safety constraints as CDF barriers. A CDF barrier approximates the local free configuration space, substantially reducing the number of collision-checking operations during motion planning. However, learning a CDF barrier with a neural network and relying on online sensor observations introduce uncertainties that must be considered during control synthesis. To address this, we develop a distributionally robust CDF barrier formulation for control that explicitly accounts for modeling errors and sensor noise without assuming a known underlying distribution. Simulations and hardware experiments on a 6-DoF xArm manipulator show that our neural CDF barrier formulation enables efficient planning and robust real-time safe control in cluttered and dynamic environments, relying only on onboard point-cloud observations.