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

This paper investigates a consensus controller for multi-agent systems that can guarantee both the safety and the privacy of the agents. The controller, built upon the idea of output prediction and the Newton-Raphson method, guarantees consensus for a class of heterogeneous systems. Its required inter-agent data-exchange consists of the predicted agents' locations but not their state variables, which guarantees a measure of privacy. Using the Control Barrier Function, which confines the agents' states within the pre-defined safety sets, the safety of the agents is also guaranteed. We verify the proposed controller on a platoon of autonomous vehicles modeled by kinematic bicycles. Simulation results show that the agents achieve leader-follower consensus and avoid collisions while keeping a suitable inter-agent distances.