Hardware-Aware SE(3) Control Barrier Functions for Counter-UAS Interceptors with Directed Energy Payloads

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Simulation Demo

The animation below compares two methods on the SE(3) CBF scenario: the unfiltered controller (red) and the proposed ADMM-CBF safety filter (blue), which maintains FoV pointing throughout the pursuit maneuver.

Key Contributions

A hardware-aware CBF safety filter on the SE(3) manifold that provides formal FoV pointing guarantees for directed-energy payloads under aggressive pursuit dynamics.
Formulation of phased-array electronic steering limits as a relative-degree-two safety constraint with analytically verified Lie derivatives.
An ADMM solver with constant-time core factorization enabling real-time onboard execution.
Validation in both a nonlinear SE(3) simulation and a PX4 SITL environment, demonstrating elimination of all FoV violations and recovery of antenna gain through beam tightening.

Paper Accepted at ICUAS 2026

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our paper has been accepted at the 2026 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS):

Hardware-Aware SE(3) Control Barrier Functions for Counter-UAS Interceptors with Directed Energy Payloads

Evangelos Vlachos, Panayiotis Kolios, and Christos Skliros

This paper addresses the safety-critical control problem of keeping a directed-energy phased-array payload’s boresight aimed at a target UAS during high-speed interception. We develop SE(3) Control Barrier Functions that enforce a field-of-view constraint on the interceptor’s attitude while respecting the physical limits of the onboard hardware, solved efficiently via ADMM at high update rates.

This work is supported by the EU Horizon Europe project EUSOME (Grant Agreement No. 101187121).

Control Barrier Functions | Dr. Evangelos Vlachos

Hardware-Aware SE(3) Control Barrier Functions for Counter-UAS Interceptors with Directed Energy Payloads

Simulation Demo

Key Contributions

Paper Accepted at ICUAS 2026

Hardware-Aware SE(3) Control Barrier Functions for Counter-UAS Interceptors with Directed Energy Payloads