For letting mobile robots travel flexibly through complicated environments, increasing attention has been paid to the whole-body collision evaluation. Most existing works either opt for the conservative corridor-based methods that impose strict requirements on the corridor generation, or ESDF-based methods that suffer from high computational overhead. It is still a great challenge to achieve fast and accurate whole-body collision evaluation. In this paper, we propose a Robo-centric ESDF (RC-ESDF) that is pre-built in the robot body frame and is capable of seamlessly applied to any-shape mobile robots, even for those with non-convex shapes. RC-ESDF enjoys lazy collision evaluation, which retains only the minimum information sufficient for whole-body safety constraint and significantly speeds up trajectory optimization. Based on the analytical gradients provided by RC-ESDF, we optimize the position and rotation of robot jointly, with whole-body safety, smoothness, and dynamical feasibility taken into account. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments verified the reliability and generalizability of our method.

翻译：为使移动机器人在复杂环境中灵活移动，全身碰撞评估日益受到关注。现有方法要么采用保守的走廊约束方法，对走廊生成提出严格限制；要么采用基于ESDF的方法，但其计算开销较大。实现快速准确的全身碰撞评估仍是一大挑战。本文提出一种以机器人为中心的ESDF（RC-ESDF），该距离场在机器人本体坐标系中预先构建，能够无缝应用于任意形状的移动机器人，甚至包括非凸形机器人。RC-ESDF采用惰性碰撞评估策略，仅保留满足全身安全约束的最小必要信息，显著加速轨迹优化。基于RC-ESDF提供的解析梯度，我们联合优化机器人的位置与旋转，同时考虑全身安全性、平滑性和动力学可行性。大量仿真与真实世界实验验证了该方法的可靠性与泛化能力。