Perception-Aware Leader-Follower Control

Distributed Perception Aware Safe Leader Follower System via Control Barrier Methods

Richie R. Suganda★, Tony Tran♦, Miao Pan, Lei Fan, Qin Lin, Bin Hu

📄 PDF

🎥 Video

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025 — Acceptance Rate: 38.67%

Overview

This work introduces a distributed perception-aware safe leader-follower formation control framework using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). The key challenge in leader-follower systems is maintaining visual contact between robots while executing formation maneuvers. Our approach guarantees that the leader remains within the follower’s field of view (FOV) by incorporating perception constraints directly into the control design via CBFs.

Two ROSbot Pro 2 robots demonstrate perception-aware leader-follower control using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to maintain visual contact.

Key Contributions

Perception-Aware CBFs: Novel CBF formulation that encodes field-of-view constraints directly into the control barrier framework
Distributed Architecture: Each robot computes local control inputs using only onboard sensing and neighbor information
Hardware Validation: Real-world experiments on ROSbot Pro 2 platforms demonstrating robust visual contact maintenance
Safety Guarantees: Formal proof that the proposed CBFs guarantee forward invariance of the safe set

Experimental validation: Our CBF-based approach reliably keeps the leader within the follower's field of view, while conventional formation control without CBFs often loses visual contact, leading to unsafe behavior.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{suganda2025distributed,
  title={Distributed Perception Aware Safe Leader Follower System via Control Barrier Methods},
  author={Suganda, Richie R. and Tran, Tony and Pan, Miao and Fan, Lei and Lin, Qin and Hu, Bin},
  booktitle={2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages={7794--7800},
  year={2025},
  organization={IEEE}
}