Distributed safety verification for multi-agent systems

The control barrier function (CBF) framework is a powerful tool for safe controller design and safety analysis. Given a dynamical system and a CBF, the system is safe if the CBF-induced constraints are satisfied for every state inside an invariant set, which is a subset of the safe set. In this pape...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, H, Papachristodoulou, A, Margellos, K
Format: Conference item
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2023
Description
Summary:The control barrier function (CBF) framework is a powerful tool for safe controller design and safety analysis. Given a dynamical system and a CBF, the system is safe if the CBF-induced constraints are satisfied for every state inside an invariant set, which is a subset of the safe set. In this paper we propose a safety verification algorithm for networked nonlinear multi-agent systems. In our proposed algorithm, we independently sample scenarios from the invariant set, and subsequently quantify safety for the multi-agent system by solving a scenario program in a distributed manner. Both the scenario sampling and safety verification algorithms are fully distributed. The efficacy of our algorithm is demonstrated by an example on multi-robot collision avoidance.