Risk-Aware Robot Control in Dynamic Environments Using Belief Control Barrier Functions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Han, Shaohang, Vahs, Matti, Tumova, Jana
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Han, Shaohang
Vahs, Matti
Tumova, Jana
author_facet Han, Shaohang
Vahs, Matti
Tumova, Jana
contents Ensuring safety for autonomous robots operating in dynamic environments can be challenging due to factors such as unmodeled dynamics, noisy sensor measurements, and partial observability. To account for these limitations, it is common to maintain a belief distribution over the true state. This belief could be a non-parametric, sample-based representation to capture uncertainty more flexibly. In this paper, we propose a novel form of Belief Control Barrier Functions (BCBFs) specifically designed to ensure safety in dynamic environments under stochastic dynamics and a sample-based belief about the environment state. Our approach incorporates provable concentration bounds on tail risk measures into BCBFs, effectively addressing possible multimodal and skewed belief distributions represented by samples. Moreover, the proposed method demonstrates robustness against distributional shifts up to a predefined bound. We validate the effectiveness and real-time performance (approximately 1kHz) of the proposed method through two simulated underwater robotic applications: object tracking and dynamic collision avoidance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_04097
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Risk-Aware Robot Control in Dynamic Environments Using Belief Control Barrier Functions
Han, Shaohang
Vahs, Matti
Tumova, Jana
Systems and Control
Robotics
Ensuring safety for autonomous robots operating in dynamic environments can be challenging due to factors such as unmodeled dynamics, noisy sensor measurements, and partial observability. To account for these limitations, it is common to maintain a belief distribution over the true state. This belief could be a non-parametric, sample-based representation to capture uncertainty more flexibly. In this paper, we propose a novel form of Belief Control Barrier Functions (BCBFs) specifically designed to ensure safety in dynamic environments under stochastic dynamics and a sample-based belief about the environment state. Our approach incorporates provable concentration bounds on tail risk measures into BCBFs, effectively addressing possible multimodal and skewed belief distributions represented by samples. Moreover, the proposed method demonstrates robustness against distributional shifts up to a predefined bound. We validate the effectiveness and real-time performance (approximately 1kHz) of the proposed method through two simulated underwater robotic applications: object tracking and dynamic collision avoidance.
title Risk-Aware Robot Control in Dynamic Environments Using Belief Control Barrier Functions
topic Systems and Control
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04097