Safety-Critical Containment Control for Quadrotor Team Using Exponential Control Barrier Functions

In this work, the containment control problem for a quadrotor team is addressed in the presence of multiple dynamic leaders with unknown bounded time-varying inputs. Both safety-critical constraints and input constraints are considered. Specifically, a linear extended state observer (ESO) is employed to handle the uncertainty and disturbance. A distributed fixed-time observer is designed to estimate the reference signal requiring no global information. The proposed nominal controller can guarantee the formation geometric constraint in steady states. Moreover, safety certificates for collision-free in transient states is enforced by using exponential control barrier functions (ECBFs). A real-time quadratic programming (QP) problem is constructed to modify the nominal controller such that both safety constraint and input constraint can be satisfied. Finally, simulations and experiments illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.