''It Is Much Safer to Be Sparse than Connected'': Safe Control of Robotic Swarm Density Dynamics with PDE-Optimization with State Constraints
Provides a safety-guaranteed control method for robotic swarm density regulation, addressing a key challenge in multi-robot systems.
This paper presents a closed-loop, safety-critical control strategy for robotic swarms using control Lyapunov and barrier functions to guide density dynamics to a target distribution, with theoretical safety guarantees and experimental validation showing sparse swarms more easily satisfy safety constraints.
This paper introduces a safety-critical optimization-based control strategy that leverages control Lyapunov and control barrier functions to guide the spatial density of robotic swarms governed by the Fokker-Planck equation to a predefined target distribution. In contrast to traditional open-loop state-constrained optimal control strategies, the proposed approach operates in closed-loop, and a Voronoi-based variant further enables distributed deployments. Theoretical guarantees of safety are derived, and numerical simulations demonstrate the performance of the proposed controllers. Finally, a multi-robot experiment showcases the real-world applicability of the proposed controllers under localization and motion noises, illustrating how it is much easier for a sparse swarm to satisfy safety specifications than it is for a densely packed one.