Safe, Fast, and Efficient Distributed Receding Horizon Constrained Control of Aerial Robot Swarms

Abstract

This letter proposes a reactive, safe, and high-performance distributed constrained control law for ensuring safety in multi-UAV systems. The UAVs possess higher-order nonlinear dynamics and are subject to actuation and collision avoidance constraints. To address the case of real-time multi-UAV collision avoidance, we propose a novel Trajectory-Tube Distributed Explicit Reference Governor (TT-D-ERG) approach based on the idea of embedding future state trajectories into safety tubes. The control law is ideally suited for systems with limited on-board hardware for computation and communication. The safety, efficacy, performance, and scalability of the method are demonstrated and benchmarked against state-of-the-art real-time collision avoidance methods by simulations and field experiments with multiple quadrotor UAVs (videos at https://youtu.be/V4P1O8vhKlo).