Sequential Neural Barriers for Scalable Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance

There are two major challenges for scaling up robot navigation around dynamic obstacles: the complex interaction dynamics of the obstacles can be hard to model analytically, and the complexity of planning and control grows exponentially in the number of obstacles. Data-driven and learning-based methods are thus particularly valuable in this context. However, data-driven methods are sensitive to distribution drift, making it hard to train and generalize learned models across different obstacle densities. We propose a novel method for compositional learning of Sequential Neural Control Barrier models (SNCBFs) to achieve scalability. Our approach exploits an important observation: the spatial interaction patterns of multiple dynamic obstacles can be decomposed and predicted through temporal sequences of states for each obstacle. Through decomposition, we can generalize control policies trained only with a small number of obstacles, to environments where the obstacle density can be 100x higher. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed methods in improving dynamic collision avoidance in comparison with existing methods including potential fields, end-to-end reinforcement learning, and model-predictive control. We also perform hardware experiments and show the practical effectiveness of the approach in the supplementary video.Comment: To be published in IROS 202

Autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic conditions—A bibliometric analysis

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) with their immaculate sensing and navigating capabilities are expected to revolutionize urban mobility. Despite the expected benefits, this emerging technology has certain implications pertaining to their deployment in mixed traffic streams, owing to different driving logics than Human-driven Vehicles (HVs). Many researchers have been working to devise a sustainable urban transport system by considering the operational and safety aspects of mixed traffic during the transition phase. However, limited scholarly attention has been devoted to mapping an overview of this research area. This paper attempts to map the state of the art of scientific production about autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic conditions, using a bibliometric analysis of 374 documents extracted from the Scopus database from 1999 to 2021. The VOSviewer 1.1.18 and Biblioshiny 3.1 software were used to demonstrate the progress status of the publications concerned. The analysis revealed that the number of publications has continuously increased during the last five years. The text analysis showed that the author keywords “autonomous vehicles” and “mixed traffic” dominated the other author keywords because of their frequent occurrence. From thematic analysis, three research stages associated with AVs were identified; pre-development (1999–2017), development (2017–2020) and deployment (2021). The study highlighted the potential research areas, such as involvement of autonomous vehicles in transportation planning, interaction between autonomous vehicles and human driven vehicles, traffic and energy efficiencies associated with automated driving, penetration rates for autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic scenarios, and safe and efficient operation of autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic environment. Additionally, discussion on the three key aspects was conducted, including the impacts of AVs, their driving characteristics and strategies for their successful deployment in context of mixed traffic. This paper provides ample future directions to the people willing to work in this area of autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic conditions. The study also revealed current trends as well as potential future hotspots in the area of autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic

Reference Governors: From Theory to Practice

Control systems that are subject to constraints due to physical limitations, hardware protection, or safety considerations have led to challenging control problems that have piqued the interest of control practitioners and theoreticians for many decades. In general, the design of constraint management schemes must meet several stringent requirements, for example: low computational burden, performance, recovery mechanisms from infeasibility conditions, robustness, and formulation simplicity. These requirements have been particularly difficult to meet for the following three classes of systems: stochastic systems, linear systems driven by unmodeled disturbances, and nonlinear systems. Hence, in this work, we develop three constraint management schemes, based on Reference Governor (RG), for these classes of systems. The first scheme, which is referred to as Stochastic RG, leverages the ideas of chance constraints to construct a Stochastic Robustly Invariant Maximal Output Admissible set (SR-MAS) in order to enforce constraints on stochastic systems. The second scheme, which is called Recovery RG (RRG), addresses the problem of recovery from infeasibility conditions by implementing a disturbance observer to update the MAS, and hence recover from constraint violations due to unmodeled disturbances. The third method addresses the problem of constraint satisfaction on nonlinear systems by decomposing the design of the constraint management strategy into two parts: enforcement at steady-state, and during transient. The former is achieved by using the forward and inverse steady-state characterization of the nonlinear system. The latter is achieved by implementing an RG-based approach, which employs a novel Robust Output Admissible Set (ROAS) that is computed using data obtained from the nonlinear system. Added to this, this dissertation includes a detailed literature review of existing constraint management schemes to compare and highlight advantages and disadvantages between them. Finally, all this study is supported by a systematic analysis, as well as numerical and experimental validation of the closed-loop systems performance on vehicle roll-over avoidance, turbocharged engine control, and inverted pendulum control problems