Reactive and Safe Co-Navigation with Haptic Guidance

We propose a co-navigation algorithm that enables a human and a robot to work together to navigate to a common goal. In this system, the human is responsible for making high-level steering decisions, and the robot, in turn, provides haptic feedback for collision avoidance and path suggestions while reacting to changes in the environment. Our algorithm uses optimized Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT*) to generate paths to lead the user to the goal, via an attractive force feedback computed using a Control Lyapunov Function (CLF). We simultaneously ensure collision avoidance where necessary using a Control Barrier Function (CBF). We demonstrate our approach using simulations with a virtual pilot, and hardware experiments with a human pilot. Our results show that combining RRT* and CBFs is a promising tool for enabling collaborative human-robot navigation.