Time-Margin Safety Stop Strategies for Efficient Navigation in Complex Environments

Abstract

This letter addresses the critical challenge of ensuring safe and efficient navigation of mobile robots in cluttered environments. Given the increasing complexity of robotic software, the authors emphasize the need for an immediate and collision-free stop in case of software failures when no additional planning is possible. Existing methods, due to their insufficient consideration of safety stop, often result in less efficient navigation strategies. The authors propose a novel approach that incorporates a time-margin safety stop requirement into the robot's navigation system. This strategy offers increased flexibility in trajectory planning, giving robots a time margin for stopping that improves travel time to the goal. Experimental results show that the authors' approach not only guarantees safe stops in the event of software crashes but also reduces the travel time by 34% compared to existing methods.