Distributed Safety Control for Fixed-Wing UAV Swarms within a 3D Virtual Tube via Control Barrier Functions

Safety is a key concern for UAV swarms within complex environments. The virtual tube, as a safety framework, provides an obstacle-free space for the passing-through of UAV swarms in cluttered environments. However, existing control strategies in the virtual tube exhibit certain limitations when directly applied to fixed-wing UAV swarms, including unsuitability for higher-order models and difficulty in handling the motion characteristics. This paper primarily utilizes control barrier functions (CBFs) and proposes a distributed virtual tube safety controller to guide a fixed-wing UAV swarm through a 3D virtual tube, guaranteeing the stability and safety of the UAV swarm. The proposed safety controller is compatible with the fixed-wing UAV’s dynamics, where multiple safety constraints in the 3D virtual tube are integrated and reformulated into a distributed structure. Complete safety input is further synthesized by partially combining CBFs with feedback linearization to address the mismatch between the optimization output and the actual control input. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through the high-fidelity model simulation.