Generalized reciprocal collision avoidance

Reciprocal collision avoidance has become a popular area of research over recent years. Approaches have been developed for a variety of dynamic systems ranging from single integrators to car-like, differential-drive, and arbitrary, linear equations of motion. In this paper, we present two contributions. First, we provide a unification of these previous approaches under a single, generalized representation using control obstacles. In particular, we show how velocity obstacles, acceleration velocity obstacles, continuous control obstacles, and LQR-obstacles are special instances of our generalized framework. Secondly, we present an extension of control obstacles to general reciprocal collision avoidance for non-linear, non-homogeneous systems where the robots may have different state spaces and different non-linear equations of motion from one another. Previous approaches to reciprocal collision avoidance could not be applied to such systems, as they use a relative formulation of the equations of motion and can, therefore, only apply to homogeneous, linear systems where all robots have the same linear equations of motion. Our approach allows for general mobile robots to independently