A hybrid framework for multi-vehicle collision avoidance

Abstract

With the recent surge of interest in UAVs for civilian services, the importance of developing tractable multiagent analysis techniques that provide safety and performance guarantees has drastically increased. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability has successfully provided these guarantees to small-scale systems and is flexible in terms of system dynamics. However, the exponential complexity scaling of HJ reachability with respect to system dimension prevents its direct application to larger-scale problems where the number of vehicles is greater than two. In this paper, we propose a collision avoidance algorithm using a hybrid framework for N + 1 vehicles through higher-level control logic given any N-vehicle collision avoidance algorithm. Our algorithm conservatively approximates a guaranteed-safe region in the joint state space of the N + 1 vehicles and produces a safety-preserving controller. In addition, our algorithm does not incur significant additional computation cost. We demonstrate our method in simulation.