eess.SYSep 20, 2026

Decentralized Safe Path Following for Multiple Quadrotors on Intersecting Paths with Theoretical Guarantees

Authors: Hamza Tariq, Adeel Akhtar

Organizations: Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA

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Abstract

This paper studies decentralized safe path following for multiple quadrotors on intersecting paths, where safety requires both collision avoidance and strict adherence to pre-assigned routes. The proposed controller reformulates transverse feedback linearization as a constrained quadratic program with four equality constraints: two enforce convergence to and strict adherence to the path, and two prescribe the desired speed and heading. Safety is achieved by relaxing only the along-path speed constraint, while the path and heading constraints remain hard. Under the stated assumptions, and for admissible initial conditions, the controller guarantees that all agents converge to and thereafter follow their assigned paths, avoid collisions, and avoid attitude singularities. We evaluate the controller in the Drake physics engine on non-planar intersecting paths and compare it against two nominal-plus-safety-filter cascades. Code and additional results are available at https://gradslab.github.io/safe_multiquad_pf/.

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Fig. 1: Manifold interpretation of the proposed relaxation. The nominal TFL controller stabilizes the intersection of the path-following and secondary-objective manifolds. The scalar slack δ\delta relaxes the along-path speed while the transverse and heading equalities remain hard, so the path-following manifold remains locally exponentially attractive along admissible closed-loop trajectories.
Fig. 2: Path following in Drake for four quadrotors on intersecting circular paths: proposed (solid), TFL [ 17 ] ++ filter (dashed), SE(3) [ 27 ] ++ filter (dotted). Left: three-dimensional trajectories. Right: top view. From off-path initial conditions, the proposed controller converges to and, after 1515 s, remains on its assigned path to within 0.50.5 mm, while both cascades deviate from theirs to avoid collisions.
Fig. 3: Output channels and minimum pairwise distance for the circle scenario: proposed (solid), TFL [ 17 ] ++ filter (dashed), SE(3) [ 27 ] ++ filter (dotted). The proposed controller drives the transverse and altitude channels to their references and resolves conflicts through the along-path speed, while both cascades perturb every channel.
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