Adaptive Risk-Certified Event-Triggered Replanning for Dynamic Navigation
Organizations: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer University of Houston Houston, TX 77004, USA · Department of Engineering Technology University of Houston Houston, TX 77004, USA
Abstract
Safe navigation in dynamic environments requires robots to plan under obstacle predictions whose errors are uncertain, non-stationary, and can induce rare but safety-critical failures. Existing control-barrier-function safety filters can reject immediately unsafe controls, but they provide little guidance on when the current finite-horizon planning mode itself is becoming unsafe as prediction uncertainty evolves. We propose Conformal Event-Triggered Risk-Certified Replanning (\emph{CERT-Replan}), a framework that uses calibrated barrier risk as an early-warning signal for replanning. CERT-Replan calibrates horizon-indexed obstacle-prediction residuals online and uses the resulting uncertainty radii to evaluate dynamic-obstacle safety margins. A one-step safety filter protects the next applied control, while a horizon-level risk monitor evaluates the upper-tail CVaR of predicted barrier-violation losses along the current MPC rollout. When this risk exceeds an allocated budget, CERT-Replan rejects the current planning mode and selects a lower-risk alternative, such as a different speed profile, corridor, or homotopy class, rather than repeatedly correcting the same nominal plan. In a non-stationary benchmark, CERT-Replan achieves an collision reduction relative to the safety-filter-only baseline \textcolor{black}{and a reduction relative to simple replanning triggers}, while reducing average safety-filter intervention by . \textcolor{black}{With Trajectron++, CERT-Replan achieves collision-free operation. Hardware experiments and onboard runtime profiling demonstrate computational feasibility.}
Figures & tables
| Method | Success( ) | Collision( ) | Path length( ) | Replans | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DPCBF [ 29 ] | 19 | 81 | 47.6 | 0.092 | - |
| TEB [ 32 ] | 85 | 15 | 47.3 | - | - |
| ICP [ 20 ] | 63 | 37 | 48.2 | - | - |
| AAC-DPCBF (Ours) | 96 | 4 | 51.1 | 0.237 | - |
| CERT-Replan (Ours) | 97 | 3 | 51.9 | 0.156 | 35 |
| Method | Success( ) | Collision( ) | Path length( ) | Replans | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DPCBF [ 29 ] | 3 | 97 | 46.0 | 0.062 | - |
| TEB [ 32 ] | 66 | 34 | 46.2 | - | - |
| ICP [ 20 ] | 80 | 20 | 47.0 | - | - |
| AAC-DPCBF (Ours) | 79 | 12 | 55.7 | 0.327 | - |
| Slack-Replan | 83 | 9 | 54.1 | ||
| Periodic-Replan | 81 | 9 | 54.8 |
Appendix figures & tables3 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Environment | Method | Success(%) | Collision(%) | Path length(m) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dense crowd | DPCBF [ 29 ] | 19 | 81 | 47.6 | 0.092 |
| ACI+DPCBF | 71 | 20 | 49.3 | 0.474 | |
| Adaptive-CVaR-DPCBF | 76 | 24 | 47.7 | 0.109 | |
| AAC-DPCBF | 96 | 4 | 51.1 | 0.237 | |
| Nonstationary | DPCBF [ 29 ] | 3 | 97 | 46.0 | 0.062 |
| ACI+DPCBF | 58 | 37 | 49.2 | 0.613 |
| Parameter | Value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Simulation time step | ||
| Bicycle-model wheelbase | ||
| Discrete-time DPCBF rate | ||
| Base robot-obstacle safety radius | ||
| DPCBF curvature term | ||
| DPCBF clearance-margin term |