DUGM-R: Uncertainty-Aware Dynamic Grid Mapping and Risk-Triggered Recovery for Learned Local Navigation

Abstract:Learned local navigation in crowded indoor environments is sensitive to how dynamic obstacle motion is represented, while collision-prone behaviour may persist after nominal policy training. We present a risk-aware reinforcement-learning framework that addresses these two issues through an uncertainty-aware Dynamic Uncertainty Grid Map (DUGM) and a modular post-training recovery mechanism. DUGM combines local occupancy, estimated obstacle motion, and motion-estimation uncertainty in a robot-centric representation. After the nominal policy is frozen, a finite-horizon Risk Value Function (RVF) is trained from nominal rollouts and used to trigger a dedicated recovery policy when continued nominal execution is predicted to be collision-prone. Experiments in a held-out NVIDIA Isaac Sim clinical-logistics benchmark show that uncertainty-aware dynamic representation improves nominal navigation over static and deterministic alternatives, while the recovery mechanism further mitigates residual collision-prone behaviour. The complete framework is also deployed directly on a TurtleBot3 without policy fine-tuning, retraining, or site-specific adaptation, retaining the performance trend observed in simulation. These results indicate that uncertainty-aware dynamic representation and post-training recovery provide complementary mechanisms for improving learned local navigation.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.27338 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.27338v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.27338 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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