Design of safety distributed control under bounded time-varying communication delay

This paper addresses the design of a distributed safety controller for two agents, subject to communication delay. The control objective is to ensure safety, meaning that the state of the two-agent system does not enter an undesired set in the state space. Our approach is based on the computation of the complementary set to the maximal controlled invariant set, and on a state estimation procedure which guarantees control agreement between the two agents. We solve the safety control problem for any bounded communication delay, assuming that the two agents share the same internal clock. Performance of the controller and relevance of the proposed approach are discussed in light of simulations performed for a collision avoidance problem between two semi-autonomous vehicles at an intersection.