Guaranteed Obstacle Avoidance for Multi-Robot Operations With Limited Actuation: A Control Barrier Function Approach

This letter considers the problem of obstacle avoidance for multiple robotic agents moving in an environment with obstacles. A decentralized supervisory controller is synthesized based on control barrier functions (CBF) that guarantees obstacle avoidance with limited actuation capability. The proposed method is applicable to general nonlinear robot dynamics and is scalable to an arbitrary number of agents. Agent-to-agent communication is not required, yet a simple broadcasting scheme improves the performance of the algorithm. The key idea is based on a control barrier function constructed with a backup controller, and we show that by assuming other agents respecting the same CBF condition, the supervisory control algorithm can be implemented decentrally and guarantees obstacle avoidance for all agents.

Automated summary

This research addresses the issue of obstacle avoidance for multiple robotic agents in an environment with obstacles, and proposes a decentralized supervisory controller method based on control barrier functions to ensure all robots can successfully avoid obstacles. The approach is applicable to various nonlinear robot dynamics and scalable to multiple robots, without requiring communication between the robots.