A Hybrid Framework for Multi-Vehicle Collision Avoidance

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid framework that extends collision avoidance guarantees to multiple vehicles by combining high-level control logic with existing algorithms, maintaining safety without high computational costs.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid approach that approximates safe regions for N+1 vehicles, enabling scalable collision avoidance with minimal additional computation.

Findings

Successfully demonstrates safety guarantees in simulation

Maintains computational efficiency for larger vehicle groups

Extends Hamilton-Jacobi reachability concepts to multi-vehicle scenarios

Abstract

With the recent surge of interest in UAVs for civilian services, the importance of developing tractable multi-agent analysis techniques that provide safety and performance guarantees have drastically increased. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability has successfully provided these guarantees to small-scale systems and is flexible in terms of system dynamics. However, the exponential complexity scaling of HJ reachability with respect to system dimension prevents its direct application to larger-scale problems where the number of vehicles is greater than two. In this paper, we propose a collision avoidance algorithm using a hybrid framework for N+1 vehicles through higher-level control logic given any N-vehicle collision avoidance algorithm. Our algorithm conservatively approximates a guaranteed-safe region in the joint state space of the N+1 vehicles and produces a safety-preserving controller. In addition, our algorithm does not incur significant additional computation cost. We demonstrate our proposed method in simulation.