The Admissible Gap (AG) Method for Reactive Collision Avoidance

M. Mujahed and B. Mertsching


This paper proposes a new concept, the Admissible Gap, for reactive collision avoidance. We call a gap admissible if it is possible to find a collision-free motion command that guides a mobile robot through it, while respecting the vehicle constraints. By utilizing this concept, a new collision avoidance approach was developed, achieving an outstanding performance in unknown dense environments. Unlike the widely used gap-based techniques, our approach directly accounts for the exact shape and kinematics, rather than finding a direction solution and turning it later into a collision-free admissible motion. Experimental results demonstrated the outstanding behavior of the AG approach. Furthermore, a comparison with existing state-of-the-art methods showed that the AG approach achieves the best results in terms of efficiency, safety, and smoothness.