In this paper, we propose a collision avoidance safety filter for autonomous electric scooters to enable safe operation of such vehicles in pedestrian areas. In particular, we employ multiple low-cost ultrasonic sensors to detect a wide range of possible obstacles in front of the e-scooter. Based on possibly faulty distance measurements, we design a filter to mitigate measurement noise and missing values as well as a gain-scheduled controller to limit the velocity commanded to the e-scooter when required due to imminent collisions. The proposed controller structure is able to prevent collisions with unknown obstacles by deploying a reduced safe velocity ensuring a sufficiently large safety distance. The collision avoidance approach is designed such that it may be easily deployed in similar applications of general micromobility vehicles. The effectiveness of our proposed safety filter is demonstrated in real-world experiments.

翻译：本文提出一种用于自主电动滑板车的碰撞规避安全滤波器，旨在实现此类车辆在行人区域的安全运行。具体而言，我们采用多个低成本超声波传感器，检测电动滑板车前方广泛范围内的潜在障碍物。基于可能存在误差的距离测量值，我们设计了一种滤波器以抑制测量噪声及缺失数据，并构建了增益调度控制器——当面临即将发生的碰撞时，该控制器能按需限制电动滑板车的指令速度。所提出的控制器结构通过部署降低的安全速度来确保足够的安全距离，从而能够防止与未知障碍物发生碰撞。该碰撞规避方法的设计使其可便捷地部署于同类通用微型交通应用场景中。基于真实环境实验验证了所提安全滤波器的有效性。