Benchmarking Collision Avoidance Schemes for Dynamic Environments

This paper evaluates and compare three stateof-the-art collision avoidance schemes designed to operate in dynamic environments. The first one is an extension of the popular Dynamic Window approach; it is henceforth called TVDW which stands for Time-Varying Dynamic Window. The second one called NLVO builds upon the concept of Non Linear Velocity Obstacle which is a generalization of the Velocity Obstacle concept. The last one is called ICS-AVOID, it draws upon the concept of Inevitable Collision States, ie states for which, no matter what the future trajectory of the robotic system is, a collision eventually occurs. 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 primary 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.