An Efficient Reachability-Based Framework for Provably Safe Autonomous Navigation in Unknown Environments

Andrea Bajcsy, Somil Bansal, Eli Bronstein, Varun Tolani, Claire J. Tomlin

Abstract: Real-world autonomous vehicles often operate in a priori unknown environments. Since most of these systems are safety-critical, it is important to ensure they operate safely even when faced with environmental uncertainty. Current safety analysis tools enable autonomous systems to reason about safety given full information about the state of the environment a priori. However, these tools do not scale well to scenarios where the environment is being sensed in real time, such as during navigation tasks. In this work, we propose a novel, real-time safety analysis method based on Hamilton-Jacobi reachability that provides strong safety guarantees despite the unknown parts of the environment. Our safety method is planner-agnostic and provides guarantees for a variety of mapping sensors. We demonstrate our approach in simulation and in hardware to provide safety guarantees around a state-of-the-art vision-based, learning-based planner. Videos of our approach and experiments are available on the project website <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .