Certificate-Guided Safe Tracking Control for Allocation-Guided Multi-UAV Missions

Hierarchical multi-UAV planning can produce scheduled paths that become unsafe during execution because tracking dynamics, actuator limits, sampling, and communication are not fully represented upstream. We introduce a certificate-guided safe-tracking framework that treats each planned path as a versioned execution contract with explicit tube, separation, timing, uncertainty, communication, and input bounds. A rigid-body-derived translational interface supports a command-producing control Lyapunov function–control barrier function quadratic program with hard safety constraints. When a candidate becomes infeasible, a separate minimum-slack program localizes the conflict without passing its command to the plant, and an explicit repair map converts the resulting witness into timing or vertical-spacing updates, with escalation when local repair fails. Randomized comparisons show that certificate feedback removes the observed tube and separation failures of a plain CBF-QP while maintaining reliable completion and competitive tracking relative to a tracking-error-bound comparator. Disturbance and sensor-noise sweeps characterize robustness, and separate indoor flights confirm single-reference trackability. The framework therefore turns execution infeasibility into actionable planning feedback rather than a terminal controller failure.