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arXiv · 2605.15782

Reactive Robot-Centric Safety for Autonomous Navigation in Constrained and Dynamic Environments

Viswa Narayanan Sankaranarayanan·Vignesh K. Viswanathan·Akshit Saradagi·Sumeet Satpute·George Nikolakopoulos
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Abstract

In this work, we address the problem of ensuring real-time safety in autonomous robot navigation, in spatially constrained dynamic environments, by utilizing only onboard sensors. We present a real-time control architecture that integrates a 3D LIDAR perception-based composite control barrier function(CBF)-based safety filter directly into the autonomy pipeline. The proposed perception-driven framework enforces collision avoidance constraints dynamically from onboard point cloud data, thus allowing a large number of constraints to be handled at the control frequency, while remaining minimally invasive to nominal task execution. The safety region is defined as an ellipsoid in the body-frame, consistent with the geometry of the platform, which induces time-varying constraints in the world frame as the robot rotates; this effect is handled through a dedicated formulation of time-varying (CBF) for each LIDAR point. We validate the system through multiple field experiments in underground environments by utilizing a quadruped platform performing a visual inspection task, demonstrating reliable operation in the presence of dynamic obstacles, unsafe high-level references, abrupt localization anomalies, and while traversing through narrow corridors.

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Viswa Narayanan Sankaranarayanan, Vignesh K. Viswanathan, Akshit Saradagi, Sumeet Satpute, George Nikolakopoulos. 2026-05-15. Reactive Robot-Centric Safety for Autonomous Navigation in Constrained and Dynamic Environments. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15782

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