RH-Map: Online Map Construction Framework of Dynamic Objects Removal Based on Region-wise Hash Map Structure

Mobile robots operating in outdoor environments frequently encounter the issue of undesired traces left by dynamic objects and manifested as obstacles on the map, impeding the robot's ability to achieve accurate localization and navigation performance. To address this problem, we present a novel online map construction framework called RH-Map. Our framework leverages a newly proposed 3D region-wise hash map data structure for efficiently removing dynamic objects in real-time. It comprises a real-time dynamic object removal front-end module S2M-R and a lightweight back-end module for further removal. We conducted extensive experiments on the SemanticKITTI dataset, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method performs favorably compared to state-of-the-art approaches, and we further validated the proposed framework in real-world environment. The source code is released and available for the community.

Dynamic Control Barrier Function-based Model Predictive Control to Safety-Critical Obstacle-Avoidance of Mobile Robot

This paper presents an efficient and safe method to avoid static and dynamic obstacles based on LiDAR. First, point cloud is used to generate a real-time local grid map for obstacle detection. Then, obstacles are clustered by DBSCAN algorithm and enclosed with minimum bounding ellipses (MBEs). In addition, data association is conducted to match each MBE with the obstacle in the current frame. Considering MBE as an observation, Kalman filter (KF) is used to estimate and predict the motion state of the obstacle. In this way, the trajectory of each obstacle in the forward time domain can be parameterized as a set of ellipses. Due to the uncertainty of the MBE, the semi-major and semi-minor axes of the parameterized ellipse are extended to ensure safety. We extend the traditional Control Barrier Function (CBF) and propose Dynamic Control Barrier Function (D-CBF). We combine D-CBF with Model Predictive Control (MPC) to implement safety-critical dynamic obstacle avoidance. Experiments in simulated and real scenarios are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our algorithm. The source code is released for the reference of the community.