Lightweight Collision Avoidance for Resource-Constrained Robots

Abstract

One of the safest and most reliable strategies for vehicle's collision avoidance is embedded control at low level to guarantee safe motion in all situations using on-board sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight collision avoidance strategy that can be implemented as a low level motion control to achieve safe motion while simultaneously tracking the robot's reference control input. This strategy is designed to be general so that it can be easily integrated with most control designs, with the primary target of resource-constrained robot swarms that act in real-time, dynamic environments. The main advantages of our approach are a very simple structure and low computational requirements. We verified the effectiveness of the proposed collision avoidance strategy through two simulated scenarios and with physical robots. We believe our design can be directly used in many areas, such as autonomous driving, intelligent transportation and planetary exploration.