Model Free Barrier Functions via Implicit Evading Maneuvers
This addresses safety-performance trade-offs in autonomous aircraft control, though it is incremental as it builds on existing barrier function methods.
The paper tackles the problem of barrier functions being overly restrictive in fixed-wing collision avoidance, showing they can cause closer near-collisions or unnecessary safety declarations. It introduces model-free barrier functions and demonstrates their effectiveness in simulations.
This paper demonstrates that the safety override arising from the use of a barrier function can in some cases be needlessly restrictive. In particular, we examine the case of fixed-wing collision avoidance and show that when using a barrier function, there are cases where two fixed-wing aircraft can come closer to colliding than if there were no barrier function at all. In addition, we construct cases where the barrier function labels the system as unsafe even when the vehicles start arbitrarily far apart. In other words, the barrier function ensures safety but with unnecessary costs to performance. We therefore introduce model-free barrier functions which take a data driven approach to creating a barrier function. We demonstrate the effectiveness of model-free barrier functions in a collision avoidance simulation of two fixed-wing aircraft.