Deploying drone swarms to track a dynamic target in cluttered environments presents severe computational and safety challenges. We propose MROPE, a hierarchical strategy that decouples the cooperative monitoring mission from strict local safety requirements. To overcome the computational bottlenecks typical of dense spaces, our approach dynamically aggregates complex obstacle geometries into a single safe bounding ellipse for each drone. Methodologically, this architecture is realized by combining distributed aggregative optimization for high-level swarm coordination, a decentralized consensus scheme for the safe area computation, and local Predictive Safety Filters (PSF) for real-time collision avoidance. Virtual and real-world experiments validate the framework, demonstrating superior real-time efficiency and scalability compared to centralized approaches.
Autonomous exploration in unknown environments is typically driven by informative frontiers, viewpoints, or trajectories, while local safety controllers avoid obstacles represented in the current map. Under finite sensing range and limited field of view, this separation can be un…
Multi-drone payload transportation has emerged as a promising research paradigm with potential applications in construction, logistics, and disaster response. However, the complex coupled dynamics among drones, cables, and payloads pose significant challenges, and existing approa…
Mobile robots are going to share the sidewalks with pedestrians. They must ensure their objective safety and respect the walkers' subjective safety/comfort. Computationally efficient Social Force Models (SFM) present interpretable solutions for real-time robot navigation in dynam…
Learning-based separation assurance for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) achieves near-zero collision rates in simulation, but assumes accurate position and velocity information from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). This assumption fails in urban environments, wh…
Safe steerable catheter control is fundamentally a problem of interaction dynamics: the tip must follow a planned motion, remain compliant against moving tissue, reject friction and hysteresis, and respect a clinically meaningful never-exceed contact-force bound. We formulate cat…
Cooperative localization using range-based measurements is critical for multi-robot systems operating in GPS-denied and unstructured environments. However, traditional cooperative approaches require sharing explicit spatial coordinates across the network, presenting a severe secu…