Closing the Loop: Real-Time Perception and Control for Robust Collision Avoidance with Occluded Obstacles

Robots have been successfully used in well-structured and deterministic environments, but they are still unable to function in unstructured environments mainly because of missing reliable real-time systems that integrate perception and control. In this paper, we close the loop between perception and control for real-time obstacle avoidance by introducing a new robust perception algorithm and a new collision avoidance strategy, which combines local artificial potential fields with global elastic planning to maintain the convergence towards the goal. We evaluate our new approach in real-world experiments using a Franka Panda robot and show that it is able to robustly avoid dynamic or even partially occluded obstacles while performing position or path following tasks.