Control Barrier Functions via Minkowski Operations for Safe Navigation among Polytopic Sets

Abstract: Safely navigating around obstacles while respecting the dynamics, control, and geometry of the underlying system is a key challenge in robotics. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) generate safe control policies by considering system dynamics and geometry when calculating safe forward-invariant sets. Existing CBF-based methods often rely on conservative shape approximations, like spheres or ellipsoids, which have explicit and differentiable distance functions. In this paper, we propose an optimization-defined CBF that directly considers the exact Signed Distance Function (SDF) between a polytopic robot and polytopic obstacles. Inspired by the Gilbert-Johnson-Keerthi (GJK) algorithm, we formulate both (i) minimum distance and (ii) penetration depth between polytopic sets as convex optimization problems in the space of Minkowski difference operations (the MD-space). Convenient geometric properties of the MD-space enable the derivatives of implicit SDF between two polytopes to be computed via differentiable optimization. We demonstrate the proposed framework in three scenarios including pure translation, initialization inside an unsafe set, and multi-obstacle avoidance. These three scenarios highlight the generation of a non-conservative maneuver, a recovery after starting in collision, and the consideration of multiple obstacles via pairwise CBF constraint, respectively.