OSCAR: Obstacle Survival Curves for Adaptive Robot Navigation

Abstract

A mobile robot following a graph of known routes can make costly navigation errors when a temporary obstacle blocks a critical edge: waiting too long behind a parked cart wastes time, but immediately rerouting around a person who would move in a few seconds is also inefficient. Standard reactive obstacle avoidance addresses local motion around obstacles, while fixed wait-or-reroute rules ignore how long different obstacle types tend to persist. We propose OSCAR: an adaptive survival-modeling framework for graph-based navigation with temporary blockages. Assuming obstacle class labels are available at encounter time, the robot learns class-conditioned residual clearance-time distributions from online experience, including right-censored observations when it reroutes before observing clearance. These survival models are integrated into a time-dependent graph planner that maintains obstacle memory and computes a patience threshold at each blocked edge: how long to wait before taking an alternate route. The method continuously updates its clearance estimates across episodes and uses them to balance waiting against rerouting. We evaluate the approach in simulation and on a real mobile robot in a university atrium with obstacles including people, chairs, bins, and tubes. In simulation, the learned policy's time-to-goal converges to within 1% of an oracle with access to ground-truth clearance distributions after fewer than 20 observations per obstacle class, outperforming all heuristic baselines. Real-world deployment confirms that the policy improves online, adapting its patience thresholds from experience across 50 navigation episodes.