A Collision Cone Approach for Control Barrier Functions

This work presents a general framework for collision avoidance using collision cone control barrier functions (C3BFs) in both autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) and autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV). We propose a novel control barrier function (CBF) formulation inspired by collision cones by constraining the relative velocity between the vehicle and the obstacle to always point away from each other. The proposed approach is demonstrated to effectively avoid collisions with kinematically moving obstacles through simulations and hardware implementations on the TurtleBot, Stoch-Jeep, and Crazyflie 2.1 quadrotor. The real-time safety-critical controller is developed using control barrier function-based quadratic programs (CBF-QPs) with popular AGV and AAV models in the literature. Comparison with the state-of-the-art CBF highlights the less conservative nature of the proposed approach. Broadly, this research contributes a collision cone-inspired control barrier framework that provides formal guarantees for collision avoidance in autonomous vehicles.