Collaborative Safety-Critical Formation Control with Obstacle Avoidance
<|reference_start|>Collaborative Safety-Critical Formation Control with Obstacle Avoidance: This work explores a collaborative method for ensuring safety in multi-agent formation control problems. We formulate a control barrier function (CBF) based safety filter control law for a generic distributed formation controller and extend our previously developed collaborative safety framework to an obstacle avoidance problem for agents with acceleration control inputs. We then incorporate multi-obstacle collision avoidance into the collaborative safety framework. This framework includes a method for computing the maximum capability of agents to satisfy their individual safety requirements. We analyze the convergence rate of our collaborative safety algorithm, and prove the linear-time convergence of cooperating agents to a jointly feasible safe action for all agents under the special case of a tree-structured communication network with a single obstacle for each agent. We illustrate the analytical results via simulation on a mass-spring kinematics-based formation controller and demonstrate the finite-time convergence of the collaborative safety algorithm in the simple proven case, the more general case of a fully-connected system with multiple static obstacles, and with dynamic obstacles.<|reference_end|>
@article{butler2024collaborative,
    title={Collaborative Safety-Critical Formation Control with Obstacle Avoidance},
    author={Brooks A. Butler, Chi Ho Leung, and Philip E. Par'e},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.03885},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2410.03885},
    primaryClass={cs.RO cs.SY eess.SY math.OC}
}