English

Decentralized CBF-based Safety Filters for Collision Avoidance of Cooperative Missile Systems with Input Constraints

Systems and Control 2026-03-17 v3 Systems and Control

Abstract

This paper presents a decentralized safety filter for collision avoidance in multi-agent aerospace interception scenarios. The approach leverages robust control barrier functions (RCBFs) to guarantee forward invariance of safety sets under bounded inputs and high-relative-degree dynamics. Each effector executes its nominal cooperative guidance command, while a local quadratic program (QP) modifies the input only when necessary. Event-triggered activation based on range and zero-effort miss (ZEM) criteria ensures scalability by restricting active constraints to relevant neighbors. To resolve feasibility issues from simultaneous constraints, a slack-variable relaxation scheme is introduced that prioritizes critical agents in a Pareto-optimal manner. Simulation results in many-on-many interception scenarios demonstrate that the proposed framework maintains collision-free operation with minimal deviation from nominal guidance, providing a computationally efficient and scalable solution for safety-critical multi-agent aerospace systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.06846,
  title  = {Decentralized CBF-based Safety Filters for Collision Avoidance of Cooperative Missile Systems with Input Constraints},
  author = {Johannes Autenrieb and Mark Spiller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.06846},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

7 pages, 5 figures, accepted for presentation at the 2026 American Control Conference (ACC 2026)