Distributed Safe Navigation of Multi-Agent Systems Using Control Barrier Function-Based Controllers

This letter proposes a distributed controller synthesis framework for safe navigation of multi-agent systems. We leverage control barrier functions to formulate collision avoidance with obstacles and teammates as constraints on the control input for a state-dependent network optimization problem that encodes team formation and the navigation task. Our algorithmic solution is valid under general assumptions for nonlinear dynamics and state-dependent network optimization problems with convex constraints and strongly convex objectives. The resulting controller is distributed, satisfies the safety constraints at all times, and asymptotically converges to the solution of the state-dependent network optimization problem. We illustrate its performance in a team of differential-drive robots in a variety of complex environments, both in simulation and in hardware.