Adaptive Risk-Certified Event-Triggered Replanning for Dynamic Navigation

arXiv:2610.09302 · cs.RO, cs.SY, eess.SY · Submitted 2026-10-07 · Read on arXiv

cs.RO, cs.SY, eess.SY

Submitted: 2026-10-07

Updated: 2026-10-07

Comments: for associated mpeg file, see https://nail-uh.github.io/corl2026.github.io/

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Safe navigation in dynamic environments requires robots to plan under obstacle predictions whose errors are uncertain, non-stationary, and can induce rare but safety-critical failures.

Terminology

Abstract

Safe navigation in dynamic environments requires robots to plan under obstacle predictions whose errors are uncertain, non-stationary, and can induce rare but safety-critical failures. Existing control-barrier-function safety filters can reject immediately unsafe controls, but they provide little guidance on when the current finite-horizon planning mode itself is becoming unsafe as prediction uncertainty evolves. We propose Conformal Event-Triggered Risk-Certified Replanning (CERT-Replan), a framework that uses calibrated barrier risk as an early-warning signal for replanning. CERT-Replan calibrates horizon-indexed obstacle-prediction residuals online and uses the resulting uncertainty radii to evaluate dynamic-obstacle safety margins. A one-step safety filter protects the next applied control, while a horizon-level risk monitor evaluates the upper-tail CVaR of predicted barrier-violation losses along the current MPC rollout. When this risk exceeds an allocated budget, CERT-Replan rejects the current planning mode and selects a lower-risk alternative, such as a different speed profile, corridor, or homotopy class, rather than repeatedly correcting the same nominal plan. In a non-stationary benchmark, CERT-Replan achieves an 83.3% collision reduction relative to the safety-filter-only baseline and a 77.8% reduction relative to simple replanning triggers, while reducing average safety-filter intervention by 32.4%. With Trajectron++, CERT-Replan achieves 96% collision-free operation. Hardware experiments and onboard runtime profiling demonstrate computational feasibility.

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