“It Is Much Safer to Be Sparse than Connected”: Safe Control of Robotic Swarm Density Dynamics with PDE Optimization with State Constraints

This paper introduces a safety‐critical optimization‐based control strategy that leverages control Lyapunov and control barrier functions to guide the spatial density of robotic swarms governed by the Fokker–Planck equation to a predefined target distribution. In contrast to traditional open‐loop state‐constrained optimal control strategies, the proposed approach operates in closed‐loop, and a Voronoi‐based variant further enables distributed deployments. Theoretical guarantees of safety are derived, and numerical simulations demonstrate the performance of the proposed controllers. Finally, a multirobot experiment showcases the real‐world applicability of the proposed controllers under localization and motion noises, illustrating how it is much easier for a sparse swarm to satisfy safety specifications than it is for a densely packed one.