Red Light, Green Light Game of Multi-Robot Systems with Safety Barrier Certificates

TL;DR

This paper introduces safety barrier certificates for uncertain multi-robot systems playing a red light, green light game, ensuring safety and collision avoidance through a robust control framework validated by simulations.

Contribution

It develops a novel safety-critical control approach using exponential control barrier functions for multi-robot systems under uncertain conditions.

Findings

Successful simulation of the red light, green light game demonstrating safety guarantees.

Effective handling of system uncertainties and collision avoidance.

Robust control framework validated in a multi-robot scenario.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the safety barrier certificates for uncertain multi-robot systems playing red light, green light game. According to the rule of the game, the robots are allowed to move forward after a doll shouts `green light' and must stop when it shouts `red light'. Following this rule, a two-mode nominal controller is designed where one mode is for moving forward and the other one is for slowing down and being motionless. Then, multiple exponential control barrier functions(ECBFs) are developed to handle safety constraints for limited playground, collision avoidance, and saturation of the velocity. While designing the nominal controller and ECBFs, an estimated braking time and robust inequality constraints are derived to deal with the system uncertainty. Consequently, a controller guaranteeing safety barrier certificates of each robot has been formulated by a quadratic programming with the nominal controller and the robust inequality constraints. Finally, red light, green light game is simulated to validate the proposed safety-critical control system.