NMPC-LBF: Nonlinear MPC with Learned Barrier Function for Decentralized Safe Navigation of Multiple Robots in Unknown Environments

Amir Salimi Lafmejani, Spring Berman, Georgios Fainekos

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we present a decentralized control approach based on a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) method that employs barrier certificates for safe navigation of multiple nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots in unknown environments with static and/or dynamic obstacles. This method incorporates a Learned Barrier Function (LBF) into the NMPC design in order to guarantee safe robot navigation, i.e., prevent robot collisions with other robots and the obstacles. We refer to our proposed control approach as NMPC-LBF. Since each robot does not have a priori knowledge about the obstacles and other robots, we use a Deep Neural Network (DeepNN) running in real-time on each robot to learn the Barrier Function (BF) only from the robot's LiDAR and odometry measurements. The DeepNN is trained to learn the BF that separates safe and unsafe regions. We implemented our proposed method on simulated and actual Turtlebot3 Burger robot(s) in different scenarios. The implementation results show the effectiveness of the NMPC-LBF method at ensuring safe navigation of the robots.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationIEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages10297-10303
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781665479271
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022 - Kyoto, Japan
Duration: Oct 23 2022Oct 27 2022

Publication series

NameIEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
Volume2022-October
ISSN (Print)2153-0858
ISSN (Electronic)2153-0866

Conference

Conference2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityKyoto
Period10/23/2210/27/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Science Applications

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