Safety-Critical Coverage Control-Based Trajectory Generation for Formation Control of UAV Systems

This paper presents a safe trajectory generation framework for formation production in Multi-Agent Systems (MASs). The proposed approach integrates coverage control with Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to generate safe trajectories that guide agents from arbitrary initial positions to a desired formation. The environment is partitioned into informative and non-informative regions, where the informative regions characterize the desired geometric structure, which effectively defines the final formation. A coverage-control-based algorithm first generates nominal trajectories that drive agents toward these informative regions. To ensure safety, CBFs are incorporated as a supervisory layer that enforces obstacle avoidance and inter-agent collision avoidance while minimally modifying the nominal control inputs. Consequently, the resulting trajectories remain safe while preserving convergence toward the desired formation.