Safety-Critical Control of Quadrotor UAVs with Control Barrier Functions

Abstract

For quadrotors, imposing multiple dynamic constraints on the state simultaneously to achieve safe control is a challenging problem. In this paper, a cascaded control archi-tecture based on quadratic programming method is proposed to generate minimally-invasive and collision-free control actions. This architecture consists of exponential control barrier functions(ECBFs) to construct a non-conservative forward invariant safety region and geometric nonlinear PID attitude control with considering quadrotor dynamics to avoid the singularities of Euler-angles and the ambiguity of quaternions. The feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed cascaded control architecture is demonstrated through numerical simulations.