Collision Avoidance

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Overview

Collision avoidance studies how to detect potential impacts and choose safe actions for systems ranging from road vehicles and drones to robots, ships, and spacecraft. Common approaches include geometric methods such as velocity obstacles, model predictive control, control barrier functions, and reachability analysis, alongside reinforcement learning and learned perception. Work increasingly accounts for uncertainty in motion, sensing, communication, and hidden obstacles, and tests methods in dense multi-agent settings as well as real-world deployments. A central challenge is balancing strong safety guarantees with efficient, timely decisions that are not so conservative that they block useful motion.

Latest papers

CardsList

91 papers11 papers in the last four weeks, up 83% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Cooperative Robotics Reinforced by Collective Perception for Traffic Moderation

    May 12, 2026Mohammad Khoshkdahan, John Pravin Arockiasamy, Andy Flores Comeca +1Collision AvoidanceCooperative Perception

    Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany · Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden

  2. Decentralized Contingency MPC based on Safe Sets for Nonlinear Multi-agent Collision Avoidance

    May 11, 2026Max Studt, Georg SchildbachCollision AvoidanceModel Predictive Control

    Institute for Electrical Engineering in Medicine, University of Luebeck, Luebeck, Germany

  3. Value-Decomposed Reinforcement Learning Framework for Taxiway Routing with Hierarchical Conflict-Aware Observations

    May 9, 2026Shizhong Zhou, Haifeng Liu, Zheng Zhang +3Collision AvoidanceVehicle Routing

    National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Science on Synthetic Vision, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610000, China · College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610000, China

  4. Learning Material-Aware Hamiltonian Risk Fields for Safe Navigation

    May 7, 2026Aditya Sai Ellendula, Yi Wang, Chandrajit BajajRisk-Sensitive RLDynamical Systems

    Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA · Oden Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA

  5. Real-Time GPU-Accelerated Monte Carlo Evaluation of Safety-Critical AEB Systems Under Uncertainty

    Apr 29, 2026Akshay Karjol, Shadi AlawnehCollision AvoidanceUncertainty Quantification

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Oakland University, Rochester, MI 48309 USA

  6. The Field of Safe Motion: Operationalizing Affordances in the Field of Safe Travel Using Reachability Analysis

    Apr 29, 2026Leif Johnson, Trent Victor, Johan EngströmCollision AvoidanceSafe Motion Planning

    Waymo LLC, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California 94043 USA

  7. Compressing ACAS-Xu Lookup Tables with Binary Decision Diagrams

    Apr 29, 2026Martin Boniol, Julien Brunel, Jean-Baptiste Chaudron +2Model CompressionCollision Avoidance

    ISAE-SUPAERO · Université de Toulouse, ISAE SUPAERO, Toulouse, France · Université de Toulouse, DTIS, ONERA, Toulouse, France

  8. An Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System with Reinforcement Learning

    Apr 27, 2026Seyyid Osman Sevgili, Atahan Cilan, Mahir Demir +2RL ControlCollision Avoidance

    Turkish Aerospace Istanbul, Turkey

  9. Safe Navigation in Unknown and Cluttered Environments via Direction-Aware Convex Free-Region Generation

    Apr 26, 2026Zhicheng Song, Yongjian Li, Kai Chen +3Collision AvoidanceTrajectory Generation

    Robotics and Autonomous Systems Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore

  10. Resolving space-sharing conflicts in road user interactions through uncertainty reduction: An active inference-based computational model

    Apr 21, 2026Julian F. Schumann, Johan Engström, Ran Wei +3Collision AvoidanceIntelligent Transportation Systems

    Department of Cognitive Robotics, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands · Waymo LLC, Mountain View, CA, USA

  11. Multi-UAV Path Following using Vector-Field Guidance

    Apr 20, 2026Gautam Kumar, Amit Shivam, Ashwini RatnooMulti-Robot Formation ControlCollision Avoidance

    Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India 560012 · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

  12. Driving risk emerges from the required two-dimensional joint evasive acceleration

    Apr 20, 2026Hao Cheng, Yanbo Jiang, Wenhao Yu +9Collision AvoidanceAutonomous Driving Safety Evaluation

    School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Green Vehicle and Mobility, Beijing 100084, China · School of Traffic & Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410000, China +2

  13. A Real-Time Bike-Pedestrian Safety System with Wide-Angle Perception and Evaluation Testbed for Urban Intersections

    Apr 18, 2026Mehmet Kerem TurkcanCollision AvoidanceModel Calibration

    Columbia University

  14. CollideNet: Hierarchical Multi-scale Video Representation Learning with Disentanglement for Time-To-Collision Forecasting

    Apr 17, 2026Nishq Poorav Desai, Ali Etemad, Michael GreenspanCollision AvoidanceVideo Representation Learning

    Queen’s University, Canada

  15. CooperDrive: Enhancing Driving Decisions Through Cooperative Perception

    Apr 15, 2026Deyuan Qu, Qi Chen, Takayuki Shimizu +1Cooperative PerceptionCommunication-Efficient Collaborative Perception

    Toyota InfoTech Labs, Mountain View, CA, USA

  16. Physics-Grounded Monocular Vehicle Distance Estimation Using Standardized License Plate Typography

    Apr 14, 2026Manognya Lokesh Reddy, Zheng LiuCollision AvoidanceMetric Depth Estimation

    Department of Computer and Information Science University of Michigan-Dearborn Dearborn, Michigan, USA · Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering University of Michigan-Dearborn Dearborn, Michigan, USA

  17. "Why This Avoidance Maneuver?" Contrastive Explanations in Human-Supervised Maritime Autonomous Navigation

    Apr 9, 2026Joel Jose, Andreas Madsen, Andreas Brandsæter +2Explainable Motion PlanningCounterfactual Explanations

    Department of ICT and Natural Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Ålesund, Norway. · Department of Ocean Operations and Civil Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Ålesund, Norway. · Department of Science and Mathematics, Volda University College (HVO), Volda, Norway. +1

  18. eVTOL Aircraft Energy Overhead Estimation under Conflict Resolution in High-Density Airspaces

    Apr 7, 2026Alex Zongo, Peng WeiAir Traffic ManagementAerial Robotics

    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, George Washington University, Washington, DC, 20052, USA

  19. Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Small UAS Separation Assurance under GPS Degradation and Spoofing

    Mar 30, 2026Alex Zongo, Filippos Fotiadis, Ufuk Topcu +1Robust RLCollision Avoidance

    A. Zongo and P. Wei are with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 20052, USA. · F. Fotiadis and U. Topcu are with the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.

  20. Accelerated Spline-Based Time-Optimal Motion Planning with Continuous Safety Guarantees for Non-Differentially Flat Systems

    Mar 25, 2026Dries Dirckx, Jan Swevers, Wilm DecréMotion PlanningSafe Motion Planning

  21. From Singleton Obstacles to Clutter: Translation Invariant Compositional Avoid Sets

    Mar 23, 2026Prashant Solanki, Jasper Van Beers, Coen De VisserCollision AvoidanceReachability Analysis

    Delft University of Technology, Netherlands

  22. Collision-Free Velocity Scheduling for Multi-Agent Systems on Predefined Routes via Inexact-Projection ADMM

    Mar 23, 2026Seungyeop Lee, Jong-Han KimMulti-Agent CoordinationCollision Avoidance

    Department of Aerospace Engineering and the Program in Aerospace Systems Convergence, Inha University, Incheon, South Korea. · Aerospace Systems Research Institute, Inha University, Incheon, South Korea.

  23. A Feasibility-Enhanced Control Barrier Function Method for Multi-UAV Collision Avoidance

    Mar 13, 2026Qishen Zhong, Junlong Wu, Jian Yang +4Collision AvoidanceRobot Collision Avoidance

    School of Automation Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, Guangdong, China

  24. U-OBCA: Uncertainty-Aware Optimization-Based Collision Avoidance via Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Chance Constraints

    Mar 5, 2026Zehao Wang, Yuxuan Tang, Han Zhang +2Chance-Constrained Motion PlanningCollision Avoidance

    School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China. · Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education of China, and Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Control and Management, Shanghai 200240, China.

  25. Sim2Sea: Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer for Maritime Vessel Navigation in Congested Waters

    Mar 4, 2026Xinyu Cui, Xuanfa Jin, Xue Yan +7Sim-to-Real TransferRobot Navigation

    Institute of Automation, CAS School of Artificial Intelligence, UCAS Beijing, China · Institute of Automation, CAS Beijing, China · Zhongguancun Academy Beijing, China +1

  26. COLREGs Compliant Collision Avoidance and Grounding Prevention for Autonomous Marine Navigation

    Mar 3, 2026Mayur S. Patil, Nataraj Sudharsan, Veneela Ammula +5Collision AvoidanceConstrained Motion Planning

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA · American Bureau of Shipping, Spring, TX, USA

  27. Dodging the Moose: Experimental Insights in Real-Life Automated Collision Avoidance

    Feb 19, 2026Leila Gharavi, Simone Baldi, Yuki Hosomi +4Collision AvoidanceAutonomous Driving Planning

    Delft Center for Systems and Control, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands. · School of Mathematics, Southeast University, Nanjing, China. · Department of Advanced Energy, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Chiba 277-8561, Japan.

  28. AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

    Jan 5, 2026Yanhao Wu, Haoyang Zhang, Fei He +6Collision AvoidanceEnd-to-End Autonomous Driving

    School of Software Engineering, XJTU · Horizon Robotics · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

  29. A Convex Obstacle Avoidance Formulation

    Dec 15, 2025Ricardo Tapia, Iman SoltaniCollision AvoidanceNonlinear MPC

    Laboratory for AI, Robotics and Automation, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616 USA

  30. Integrated Noise and Safety Management in UAM via A Unified Reinforcement Learning Framework

    Aug 22, 2025Surya Murthy, Zhenyu Gao, John-Paul Clarke +1Multi-Objective Reinforcement LearningCollision Avoidance

    Graduate Research Assistant, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin · Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, The University of Texas at Austin · Professor and Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Memorial Chair in Engineering, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, The University of Texas at Austin +1