Consensus controller with safety guarantee: an application to the kinematic bicycle model

Abstract: This paper proposes a consensus controller for multi-agent systems that can guarantee the agents' safety. The controller, built with the idea of output prediction and the Newton-Raphson method, achieves consensus for a class of heterogeneous nonlinear systems. The Integral Control Barrier Function is applied in conjunction with the controller, such that the agents' states are confined within pre-defined safety sets. Due to the dynamically-defined control input, the resulting optimization problem from the barrier function is always a Quadratic Program, despite the nonlinearities that the system dynamics may have. We verify the proposed controller using a platoon of autonomous vehicles modeled by kinematic bicycles. A convergence analysis of the leader-follower consensus under the path graph topology is conducted. Simulation results show that the vehicles achieve consensus while keeping safe inter-agent distances, suggesting a potential in future applications.