Collision avoidance in dynamic environments: An ICS-based solution and its comparative evaluation

This paper presents ICS-AVOID, a collision avoidance scheme based upon the concept of Inevitable Collision State (ICS), ie a state for which, no matter what the future trajectory of the robotic system is, a collision eventually occurs. By design, ICS-AVOID can handle dynamic environments since ICS do take into account the future behaviour of moving objects. ICS-AVOID is designed to keep the system away from ICS. By doing so, motion safety is guaranteed (by definition a robotic system in a non-ICS state has at least one collision-free trajectory that it can use). To demonstrate the efficiency of ICS-AVOID, it has been extensively compared with two state-of-the-art collision avoidance schemes: the first one is built upon the Dynamic Window approach and the second one on the Velocity Obstacle concept. The results obtained show that, when provided with the same amount of information about the future evolution of the environment, ICS-AVOID outperforms the other two schemes. The first reason for this has to do with the extent to which each collision avoidance scheme reasons about the future. The second reason has to do with the ability of each collision avoidance scheme to find a safe control if one exists. ICS-AVOID is the only one which is complete in this respect thanks to the concept of Safe Control Kernel.