Safe Unicycle Navigation Among Multiple Obstacles Under Bounded Disturbances: A Learning-Augmented CLF-CBF Approach (Extended Version)

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

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Original abstract

This paper presents a robust control framework for safe navigation of a unicycle robot to a goal among multiple static obstacles under an unknown, time-varying disturbance. The controller solves a single real-time quadratic program (QP) that combines a goal-reaching term with one safety term per obstacle. The goal-reaching term is a cross-track control Lyapunov function built from body-frame tracking errors rather than a bearing angle, which keeps its Lie derivatives bounded everywhere, including the goal. Safety is encoded using robust control barrier functions, one per obstacle, each tightened by a closed-form, state-dependent disturbance bound. When stabilization and safety conflict, a slack variable relaxes only the convergence requirement, so that the safety constraints remain strictly enforced. Whenever the QP is feasible, the robust barrier constraints guarantee forward invariance of every obstacle's safe set under all admissible disturbances. Complementing this safety guarantee, a Lyapunov analysis yields an explicit ultimate bound on the distance to the goal. A learning-augmented variant replaces the fixed objective with a reinforcement-learning reference, which accelerates convergence when multiple constraints are simultaneously active. We further derive the obstacle separation below which the gap between two obstacles becomes too narrow to pass through under the robust constraints. For such gaps, a learned virtual goal for the Lyapunov function steers the robot around the obstacles without compromising safety. Simulations, a Monte Carlo study, and a comparison against a sampled-data robust baseline support the theoretical results.

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• Official / arXiv page
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