Temporal Reach-Avoid-Stay Control for Differential Drive Systems via Spatiotemporal Tubes
This addresses robust motion planning for mobile robots in dynamic environments, representing an incremental improvement with a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling differential-drive robots with uncertainties and disturbances to meet Temporal Reach-Avoid-Stay specifications, resulting in a framework that demonstrates superior robustness, accuracy, and computational efficiency in simulations.
This paper presents a computationally lightweight and robust control framework for differential-drive mobile robots with dynamic uncertainties and external disturbances, guaranteeing the satisfaction of Temporal Reach-Avoid-Stay (T-RAS) specifications. The approach employs circular spatiotemporal tubes (STTs), characterized by smoothly time-varying center and radius, to define dynamic safe corridors that guide the robot from the start region to the goal while avoiding obstacles. In particular, we first develop a sampling-based synthesis algorithm to construct a feasible STT that satisfies the prescribed timing and safety constraints with formal guarantees. To ensure that the robot remains confined within this tube, we then analytically design a closed-form control that is computationally efficient and robust to disturbances. The proposed framework is validated through simulation studies on a differential-drive robot and benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating superior robustness, accuracy, and computational efficiency.