Distributed safe control design and probabilistic safety verification for multi-agent systems

Journal article

We propose distributed iterative algorithms for safe control design and safety verification for networked multi-agent systems. These algorithms rely on distributing a control barrier function (CBF) related quadratic programming (QP) problem assuming the existence of CBFs. The proposed distributed algorithm addresses infeasibility issues of existing schemes via a cooperation mechanism between agents. The resulting control input is guaranteed to be optimal, and satisfies CBF constraints of all agents. Furthermore, a truncated algorithm is proposed to facilitate computational implementation. The performance of the truncated algorithm is evaluated using a distributed safety verification algorithm. The algorithm quantifies safety for multiagent systems probabilistically by means of CBFs. Both upper and lower bounds on the probability of safety are obtained using the so called scenario approach. Both the scenario sampling and safety verification procedures are fully distributed. The efficacy of our algorithms is demonstrated by an example on multi-robot collision avoidance.

Authors: Wang, H; Papachristodoulou, A; Margellos, K

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Automatica
• Volume: 179
• Article number: 112393
• Publication date: 2025-06-07
• Acceptance date: 2025-04-20
• DOI: 10.1016/j.automatica.2025.112393
• EISSN: 1873-2836
• ISSN: 0005-1098
• Language: English
• Keywords: nonlinear systems; safe control; scenario approach; multi-agent systems; distributed control