1. A game theoretic approach for safe and distributed control of unmanned aerial vehicles
- Author
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do Nascimento, AA, Papachristodoulou, A, and Margellos, K
- Abstract
This paper presents a safe by construction methodology to produce collision-free control laws for a population of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that can be computed in a distributed manner. We view this problem under a game theoretic lens, with UAVs seeking to reach individual locations, while being coupled by safety requirements to avoid collision as well as due to the presence of an aggregate objective encoding the population’s common goal to keep track of a common target. To achieve this, we bring together Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and a recently developed primal-dual algorithm for Nash equilibrium seeking in generalized games. Moreover, we introduce feedback by means of a receding horizon Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategy and analyze this in terms of its stability properties. The combination of these tools allows for a distributed, collision-free equilibrium solution, despite agents being coupled due to the common target they seek to track and the collision avoidance constraints. Our algorithmic results are supported theoretically and their efficacy is demonstrated via extensive numerical simulations, illustrating convergence of the proposed scheme to a safe solution, while meeting the UAVs’ individual objectives.
- Published
- 2023