Decentralized CBF-based Safety Filters for Collision Avoidance of Cooperative Missile Systems with Input Constraints

Abstract: This paper presents a decentralized safety filter for collision avoidance in multi-agent aerospace interception scenarios. The approach leverages robust control barrier functions (RCBFs) to guarantee forward invariance of safety sets under bounded inputs and high-relative-degree dynamics. Each effector executes its nominal cooperative guidance command, while a local quadratic program (QP) modifies the input only when necessary. Event-triggered activation based on range and zero-effort miss (ZEM) criteria ensures scalability by restricting active constraints to relevant neighbors. To resolve feasibility issues from simultaneous constraints, a slack-variable relaxation scheme is introduced that prioritizes critical agents in a Pareto-optimal manner. Simulation results in many-on-many interception scenarios demonstrate that the proposed framework maintains collision-free operation with minimal deviation from nominal guidance, providing a computationally efficient and scalable solution for safety-critical multi-agent aerospace systems.