Motion Planning via Reference Governors: Towards Closing the Gap Between High-Level and Low-Level Motion Planning (Talk)

In robotics, it is often practically and theoretically convenient to design motion planners for approximate simple robot and environment models first, and then adapt such reference planners to more accurate complex settings. In this talk, I will introduce a new approach to extend the applicability of motion planners of simple settings to more complex settings using reference governors. Reference governors are add-on control schemes for closed-loop dynamical systems to enforce constraint satisfaction while maintaining stability, and offers a systematic way of separating the issues of stability and constraint enforcement. I will demonstrate example applications of reference governors for sensor-based navigation in environments cluttered with convex obstacles and for smooth extensions of low-order (e.g., position- or velocity-controlled) feedback motion planners to high-order (e.g., force/torque controlled) robot models, while retaining stability and collision avoidance properties.