Provably safe motion of mobile robots in human environments

Mobile robots operating in a shared environment with pedestrians are required to move provably safe to avoid harming pedestrians. Current approaches like safety fields use conservative obstacle models for guaranteeing safety, which leads to degraded performance in populated environments. In this paper, we introduce an online verification approach that uses information about the current pedestrian velocities to compute possible occupancies based on a kinematic model of pedestrian motion. We demonstrate that our method reduces the need for stopping while retaining safety guarantees, and thus goals are reached between 1.4 and 3.5 times faster than the standard ROS navigation stack in the tested scenarios.