Date: Friday May 15th, 2026
Time: 1:00pm - 2:00pm ET
Location: Guggenheim 244
Virtual: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/295530221364067?p=XAsX2uMHAJ40THTLPb
Johnathan Corbin
Robotics Ph.D. Student
Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Committee:
Dr. Jonathan Rogers (Advisor)
Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Sarah H. Q. Li
Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Anirban Mazumdar
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Matthew Hale
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Sean Wilson
Robotics and Autonomous Systems Division
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Abstract:
In heterogeneous multi-agent systems, ensuring safety requires two distinct decisions. The first is determining what corrective action is needed. The second is assigning which agents should take it. Standard control barrier function (CBF) formulations combine these into a single centralized quadratic program, distributing corrective effort by geometric proximity with no regard for agent capability, privacy, or accumulated burden. This can cause actuator-limited agents to be unable to maintain safety and makes it difficult to adjust how responsibility is allocated to agents.
This proposal reformulates multi-agent safety-critical control as a feasible resource allocation problem through a two-stage architecture. The first stage compresses multi-constraint safety into a single, dynamically feasible "safety deficit" using integral augmentation, log-sum-exponential composition, and optimal-decay CBFs. The second stage introduces "avoidance credit," an allocable resource that decouples the physics of safety from the economics of effort distribution through a modular interface. The interface admits any allocation mechanism satisfying a small set of conditions, enabling properties such as agent privacy and long-horizon fairness. As long as the allocation satisfies these conditions, the system is guaranteed to maintain safety within the actuator limits of the agents.
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