Tube-Based Safety for Anticipative Tracking in Multi-Agent Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tube-based safety framework for robust anticipative multi-agent tracking that minimizes communication and conservatively ensures safety in cluttered environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel, explicit RPI tube radius formulation that reduces conservatism and enhances safety guarantees with minimal communication overhead.

Findings

Framework effectively navigates heterogeneous formations in cluttered environments.

Explicit RPI tube radius attenuates control barrier function tightening margins.

Minimal communication required for robust inter-agent safety.

Abstract

A tube-based safety framework is presented for robust anticipative tracking in nonlinear Brunovsky multi-agent systems subject to bounded disturbances. The architecture establishes robust safety certificates for a feedforward-augmented ancillary control policy. By rendering the state-deviation dynamics independent of the agents' internal nonlinearities, the formulation strictly circumvents the restrictive Lipschitz-bound feasibility conditions otherwise required for robust stabilization. Consequently, this structure admits an explicit, closed-form robust positively invariant (RPI) tube radius that systematically attenuates the exponential control barrier function (eCBF) tightening margins, thereby mitigating constraint conservatism while preserving formal forward invariance. Within the distributed model predictive control (MPC) layer, mapping the local tube radii through the communication graph yields a closed-form global formation error bound formulated via the minimum singular value of the augmented Laplacian. Robust inter-agent safety is enforced with minimal communication overhead, requiring only a single scalar broadcast per neighbor at initialization. Numerical simulations confirm the framework's efficacy in safely navigating heterogeneous formations through cluttered environments.