Adversarially Robust Geometric Safety Certificates for Nonholonomic Robots Against Maneuvering Obstacles

Abstract

Safe navigation against obstacles that can actively maneuver within bounded capabilities remains challenging: robust control barrier function methods typically treat obstacle actions as generic disturbances, while differential-game approaches are computationally expensive for online navigation. We propose an adversarially robust geometric certificate that accounts for the worst-case effect of admissible obstacle maneuvers directly in the safe-set geometry through a closed-form contraction of the certificate parameters. The construction exploits a structural property of line-of-sight (LoS) certificates: the robot and obstacle actions enter the certificate through a common state-dependent geometric gain. This gain cancels in the worst-case comparison, reducing the differential game to a direct comparison between obstacle maneuvering capability and the weaker of the robot's longitudinal and steering authorities. Instantiated on the parabolic certificate, the construction yields Adversarially Robust Dynamic Parabolic Control Barrier Functions (AR-DPCBF), for which we establish sufficient conditions for forward invariance of the contracted safe set against all admissible obstacle maneuvers under kinematic bicycle dynamics with bounded inputs. When the obstacle capability is unknown, a sliding-window estimator supplies a high-probability upper bound, allowing the guarantee to be retained with the corresponding coverage probability. We further formulate soft and buffered variants to recover feasibility in dense environments. Simulations across obstacle capabilities, densities, and capability mismatch show substantial reductions in barrier violations and collisions and demonstrate that pointwise robustification of the barrier derivative cannot substitute for contraction of its geometry.

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