T-CBF: Traversability-based Control Barrier Function to Navigate Vertically Challenging Terrain

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Gupta, Manas, Xiao, Xuesu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Gupta, Manas
Xiao, Xuesu
author_facet Gupta, Manas
Xiao, Xuesu
contents Safety has been of paramount importance in motion planning and control techniques and is an active area of research in the past few years. Most safety research for mobile robots target at maintaining safety with the notion of collision avoidance. However, safety goes beyond just avoiding collisions, especially when robots have to navigate unstructured, vertically challenging, off-road terrain, where vehicle rollover and immobilization is as critical as collisions. In this work, we introduce a novel Traversability-based Control Barrier Function (T-CBF), in which we use neural Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to achieve safety beyond collision avoidance on unstructured vertically challenging terrain by reasoning about new safety aspects in terms of traversability. The neural T-CBF trained on safe and unsafe observations specific to traversability safety is then used to generate safe trajectories. Furthermore, we present experimental results in simulation and on a physical Verti-4 Wheeler (V4W) platform, demonstrating that T-CBF can provide traversability safety while reaching the goal position. T-CBF planner outperforms previously developed planners by 30\% in terms of keeping the robot safe and mobile when navigating on real world vertically challenging terrain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_06083
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle T-CBF: Traversability-based Control Barrier Function to Navigate Vertically Challenging Terrain
Gupta, Manas
Xiao, Xuesu
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Safety has been of paramount importance in motion planning and control techniques and is an active area of research in the past few years. Most safety research for mobile robots target at maintaining safety with the notion of collision avoidance. However, safety goes beyond just avoiding collisions, especially when robots have to navigate unstructured, vertically challenging, off-road terrain, where vehicle rollover and immobilization is as critical as collisions. In this work, we introduce a novel Traversability-based Control Barrier Function (T-CBF), in which we use neural Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to achieve safety beyond collision avoidance on unstructured vertically challenging terrain by reasoning about new safety aspects in terms of traversability. The neural T-CBF trained on safe and unsafe observations specific to traversability safety is then used to generate safe trajectories. Furthermore, we present experimental results in simulation and on a physical Verti-4 Wheeler (V4W) platform, demonstrating that T-CBF can provide traversability safety while reaching the goal position. T-CBF planner outperforms previously developed planners by 30\% in terms of keeping the robot safe and mobile when navigating on real world vertically challenging terrain.
title T-CBF: Traversability-based Control Barrier Function to Navigate Vertically Challenging Terrain
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06083