Decoupling Collision Avoidance in and for Optimal Control using Least-Squares Support Vector Machines

Abstract: This paper details an approach to linearise differentiable but non-convex collision avoidance constraints tailored to convex shapes. It revisits introducing differential collision avoidance constraints for convex objects into an optimal control problem (OCP) using the separating hyperplane theorem. By framing this theorem as a classification problem, the hyperplanes are eliminated as optimisation variables from the OCP. This effectively transforms non-convex constraints into linear constraints. A bi-level algorithm computes the hyperplanes between the iterations of an optimisation solver and subsequently embeds them as parameters into the OCP. Experiments demonstrate the approach's favourable scalability towards cluttered environments and its applicability to various motion planning approaches. It decreases trajectory computation times between 50\% and 90\% compared to a state-of-the-art approach that directly includes the hyperplanes as variables in the optimal control problem.