Safety With Limited Range Sensing Constraints For Fixed Wing Aircraft

TL;DR

This paper develops a new barrier function approach to ensure the safety of fixed wing UAVs with limited range sensing, guaranteeing safe distances despite sensing constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a method to construct barrier functions that maintain safety under limited sensing range, extending prior work that assumed full state observability.

Findings

Successfully applied to a scenario with 20 UAVs

Maintains safe distances despite sensing limitations

Demonstrates practical effectiveness of the proposed method

Abstract

In this paper we discuss how to use a barrier function that is subject to kinematic constraints and limited sensing in order to guarantee that fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will maintain safe distances from each other at all times despite being subject to limited range sensing constraints. Prior work has shown that a barrier function can be used to guarantee safe system operation when the state can be sensed at all times. However, in this paper we show that this construction does not guarantee safety when the UAVs are subject to limited range sensing. To resolve this issue, we introduce a method for constructing a new barrier function that accommodates limited sensing range from a previously existing barrier function that may not necessarily accommodate limited range sensing. We show that, under appropriate conditions, the newly constructed barrier function ensures system safety even in the presence of limited range sensing. We demonstrate the contribution of this paper in a scenario of 20 fixed wing aircraft, where because of the proposed algorithm, the vehicles are able to maintain safe distances from each other even though the vehicles are subject to limited range sensing.