Distributed Safety Critical Control among Uncontrollable Agents Using Reconstructed Control Barrier Functions

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel distributed control method for multi-agent systems that ensures safety despite uncontrollable agents and uncertain behaviors, by reconstructing control barrier functions using distributed observers.

Contribution

It introduces a reconstructed CBF approach with adaptive parameters, enabling fully distributed safety guarantees in uncertain multi-agent environments.

Findings

The proposed control scheme guarantees safety in uncertain environments.

Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the reconstructed CBF method.

Abstract

This paper investigates the distributed safety critical control for multi-agent systems (MASs) in the presence of uncontrollable agents with uncertain behaviors. To ensure system safety, the control barrier function (CBF) is employed in this paper. However, a key challenge is that the CBF constraints are coupled when MASs perform collaborative tasks, which depend on information from multiple agents and impede the design of a fully distributed safe control scheme. To overcome this, a novel reconstructed CBF approach is proposed. In this method, the coupled CBF is reconstructed by leveraging state estimates of other agents obtained from a distributed adaptive observer. Furthermore, a prescribed performance adaptive parameter is designed to modify this reconstruction, ensuring that satisfying the reconstructed CBF constraint is sufficient to meet the original coupled one. Based on the reconstructed CBF, we design a safety-critical quadratic programming (QP) controller and prove that the proposed distributed control scheme rigorously guarantees the safety of the MAS, even in the uncertain dynamic environments involving uncontrollable agents. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated through a simulation.