Safe Polytope-in-Polytope Motion Planning and Control with Control Barrier Functions

Alejandro Gonzalez-Garcia; Dries Dirckx; Jan Swevers; Wilm Decré

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arXiv · 2606.09719

Safe Polytope-in-Polytope Motion Planning and Control with Control Barrier Functions

Alejandro Gonzalez-Garcia·Dries Dirckx·Jan Swevers·Wilm Decré

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Abstract

Autonomous mobile robots operating in tight environments require motion planning frameworks that account for the physical footprint of the robot. Simplifying the geometry to a point or a circle is conservative and discards information needed to successfully and safely traverse narrow passages. This work proposes a safe local motion planning and control method that guarantees that a polytopic robot footprint stays inside a continuously updated convex free-space region. The containment condition is formulated as a set of discrete-time control barrier function constraints within a model predictive controller. The number of safety constraints depends on the complexity of the local free-space geometry and the robot shape, instead of the number of obstacles. The proposed free-space formulation does not need any obstacle detection or segmentation. A comparative analysis against a polytope-based obstacle avoidance formulation confirms favorable scaling up to a reduction of 91$\times$ in computation time as the number of obstacles increases. The approach is validated in simulation with an autonomous surface vehicle and on hardware with a non-holonomic mobile robot, using both occupancy grids and LiDAR sensing. The experiments demonstrate safe real-time motion planning and control at 10~Hz on an onboard embedded computer, including reactive avoidance of dynamic obstacles.

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Alejandro Gonzalez-Garcia, Dries Dirckx, Jan Swevers, Wilm Decré. 2026-06-08. Safe Polytope-in-Polytope Motion Planning and Control with Control Barrier Functions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09719

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