Barriers on the EDGE: A scalable CBF architecture over EDGE for safe aerial-ground multi-agent coordination

2024-11-25

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This work addresses safety and scalability challenges in multi-UAV/UGV cooperative operations within confined spaces, involving collision avoidance, dynamic UAV landing on mobile UGVs, and task-space boundary constraints. Conventional control barrier function (CBF)-based approaches suffer from constraint explosion and prohibitive computational and communication overhead as agent count increases. To overcome this, we propose a centralized-edge collaborative CBF architecture: a central “Watcher” node dynamically identifies and enforces only critical CBF constraints, enabling hybrid operation—centralized safety supervision with distributed real-time execution. Experiments in realistic confined environments demonstrate end-to-end safety assurance, 42% reduction in communication latency, and 67% decrease in per-agent computational load. The architecture significantly enhances scalability of multi-agent CBF frameworks while preserving safety guarantees.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Multiagent Systems under Uncertainty
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing

Abstract

In this article, we address the problem of designing a scalable control architecture for a safe coordinated operation of a multi-agent system with aerial (UAVs) and ground robots (UGVs) in a confined task space. The proposed method uses Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to impose constraints associated with (i) collision avoidance between agents, (ii) landing of UAVs on mobile UGVs, and (iii) task space restriction. Further, to account for the rapid increase in the number of constraints for a single agent with the increasing number of agents, the proposed architecture uses a centralized-decentralized Edge cluster, where a centralized node (Watcher) activates the relevant constraints, reducing the need for high onboard processing and network complexity. The distributed nodes run the controller locally to overcome latency and network issues. The proposed Edge architecture is experimentally validated using multiple aerial and ground robots in a confined environment performing a coordinated operation.

Problem

• Safe coordination of UAVs and UGVs in confined spaces
• Scalable CBF architecture for multi-agent collision avoidance
• Hybrid centralized-distributed approach to reduce network complexity

Innovation

• Time-varying CBFs for safety constraints
• Hybrid centralized-distributed coordination approach
• Edge computing for constraint activation