Safety and Progress Proofs of a Reactive Autonomous Racing Algorithm

Abolfazl Karimi, Manish Goyal, Parasara Sridhar Duggirala

Abstract: In this paper, we perform a safety and performance analysis of an autonomous vehicle utilizing a reactive planner and controller to navigate a race lap. Unlike traditional planning algorithms that use a map of the environment, the reactive planner generates the plan based solely on current sensor inputs. Our reactive planner selects a waypoint on the local Voronoi diagram, and we use a pure-pursuit controller to navigate towards this waypoint.Our analysis consists of two parts. The first part demonstrates that the reactive planner computes a plan locally consistent with the Voronoi plan derived from a full map. The second part models the vehicle’s navigation along the Voronoi diagram as a hybrid automaton. To prove the safety and performance specifications, we compute the reachable set of this hybrid automaton and apply enhancements to simplify this computation. We show that an autonomous vehicle using our reactive planner and controller is safe and successfully completes a lap on five different circuits. Additionally, we have implemented our planner and controller in a simulation environment and on a scaled-down autonomous vehicle, demonstrating that our approach works well across a variety of circuits.

External IDs:dblp:conf/memocode/KarimiGD24