Safety-Critical Control for Quadrotor UAVs via Decentralized Navigation Functions

Abstract: We study safety-critical control for teams of quadrotor UAVs driven by decentralized navigation functions under learned model uncertainty. These functions generate fully actuated translational reference forces, while quadrotors can only produce thrust along their body-fixed vertical axes. We construct a thrust-attitude implementation of the induced navigation forces and quantify its error with respect to the fully actuated reference dynamics. An aggregated robust HOCBF-QP safety filter minimally modifies the nominal thrusts while guaranteeing pairwise collision avoidance with high probability.