Mathematical certification of motion planning on uncertain terrain with limited perception: a case study

Abstract: We design a controller for an agent whose mission is to reach a stationary target while avoiding a family of obstacles which are not known a-priori. The agent moves in the two dimensional plane with non-trivial double integrator dynamics and receives only local information from its surroundings. Under mild assumptions on the family of obstacles (smoothness, sufficient distance from each other, bounded curvature, etc), we prove that our control algorithm yields guaranteed obstacle avoidance and convergence to the target.