Safe navigation strategies for a biped robot walking in a crowd

Safety needs to be guaranteed before we can introduce robots into our working environments. For a biped robot to navigate safely in a crowd it must maintain balance and avoid collisions. In highly dynamic and unpredictable environments like crowds, collision avoidance is usually interpreted as passive safety, i.e. that the robot can stop before any collision occurs. We show that both balance preservation and passive safety can be analyzed, from the point of view of viability theory, as the ability of the robot to stop safely at some point in the future. This allows us to address both problems with a single model predictive controller with appropriate terminal constraints. We demonstrate that this controller predicts failures (falls and collisions) as early as the duration of the preview horizon. Finally, we propose a new strategy for safe navigation that relaxes the passive safety conditions to allow the robot to avoid a greater number of collisions.