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Title: Control Barrier Functions: Theory and Application for Safe Flight Control

Abstract: Aerial vehicles have diverse applications across many domains, including search and rescue, precision agriculture, delivery services, and aerial monitoring and surveillance. Although flight controllers are well developed and widely used on commercial aerial platforms, ensuring safety remains a challenging task, particularly under complex operating conditions and in cluttered environments. This thesis investigates the use of control barrier functions (CBFs) to enforce simultaneous position and velocity safety constraints. Several relative-degree-one CBFs are proposed and analyzed. The work begins with a double integrator system, which provides fundamental insights and allows for a comparative evaluation of the CBF formulations. The methodology is then extended to a dual-rotor rotational system with nonlinear multi–input–multi–output dynamics. Finally, the approach is applied to a bicopter system to enable safe flight control. In each case, performance is validated through numerical simulations involving unit-step responses and trajectory tracking commands.