Collaborative Altruistic Safety in Coupled Multi-Agent Systems

This paper presents a novel framework for ensuring safety in dynamically coupled multi-agent systems through collaborative control. Drawing inspiration from ecological models of altruism, we develop collaborative control barrier functions that allow agents to cooperatively enforce individual safety constraints under coupling dynamics. We introduce an altruistic safety condition based on the so-called Hamilton’s rule, enabling agents to trade off their own safety to support higher-priority neighbors. By incorporating these conditions into a distributed optimization framework, we demonstrate increased feasibility and robustness in maintaining system-wide safety. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated through simulation in a simplified formation control scenario.