Enabling Safety for Aerial Robots: Planning and Control Architectures
Kaleb Ben Naveed, Devansh R. Agrawal, Daniel M. Cherenson, Haejoon Lee, Alia Gilbert, Hardik Parwana, Vishnu S. Chipade, William Bentz, Dimitra Panagou
TL;DR
The paper tackles safe autonomy for aerial robots by integrating contingency planning, adversarial resilience, and robustness under uncertainty into a cohesive planning and control architecture. Key components include gatekeeper-based contingency planning with energy-aware and budget-aware extensions, resilience-aware control for robust consensus under adversaries, and StringNet defense for swarm safety, complemented by ECUT-based online state prediction and CBF-based safety enforcement with observer integration. Hardware demonstrations on the in-house DevQuad platform validate the practicality and real-time feasibility of the proposed methods. Collectively, the work provides scalable, hardware-backed frameworks for maintaining safety in dynamic, resource-constrained, and potentially hostile environments, with clear pathways for persistent operation and human-robot interaction.
Abstract
Ensuring safe autonomy is crucial for deploying aerial robots in real-world applications. However, safety is a multifaceted challenge that must be addressed from multiple perspectives, including navigation in dynamic environments, operation under resource constraints, and robustness against adversarial attacks and uncertainties. In this paper, we present the authors' recent work that tackles some of these challenges and highlights key aspects that must be considered to enhance the safety and performance of autonomous aerial systems. All presented approaches are validated through hardware experiments.