An efficient and generic 2D Inevitable Collision State-checker

An inevitable collision state (ICS) for a robotic system is a state for which, no matter what the future trajectory of the system is, a collision eventually occurs. ICS can be used for both motion planning (to reduce the search space) and reactive navigation (for obvious safety reasons, a robotic system should never ever move to an ICS). ICS are particularly suited for navigation in dynamic environments since they take into account the future behaviour of the moving objects. Using ICS in practice is difficult given the intrinsic complexity of their characterization. The main contribution of this paper is a generic and efficient ICS-Checker, ie an algorithm that determines whether a given state is an ICS or not, for planar robotic systems with arbitrary dynamics moving in dynamic environments. The efficiency is obtained by applying the following principles: (a) reasoning on 2D slices of the state space of the robotic system, (b) precomputing off-line as many things as possible, and (c) exploiting graphics hardware performances. The ICS-Checker has been applied to two different robotic systems: a car-like vehicle and a spaceship. It has also been integrated in a reactive navigation scheme to safely drive the car-like vehicle.