Optimal Waypoint Guidance for Collision Scenarios

<p>As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) grow in popularity for a variety of industrial, military, and civilian applications, the need for such aircraft to possess safe and reliable collision avoidance system becomes more pressing. This thesis proposes a collision avoidance system for UAVs cruising in a flight environment to avoid unexpected collision with either static and dynamic obstacles.</p><p>The proposed system can adhere to airspace regulations specifying safety zones around other aircraft, is simple enough for deployment in a "plug-and-play" fashion onboard a UAV, and is efficient in terms of control effort needed to achieve the avoidance. The system contains logic to determine if a given obstacle is threatening, as well as to generate an "aiming point" to which the vehicle should travel to avoid the obstacle; it accomplishes this by examining the geometry of the encounter and transposing the problem of collision avoidance to one of waypoint guidance. Furthermore, the system contains a simple feedback controller that can guide the ownship to such an aiming point or a generic goal in the flight environment, while minimizing the overall control effort (e.g., fuel) needed to do so.</p><p>High-fidelity simulation was used to validate the performance of the avoidance framework. The potential of the framework to enable UAVs to avoid head-on collision, even at high speeds, was also successfully demonstrated through flight tests at a university research site at an airport. In the in situ flight tests, the framework was deployed on a helicopter UAV that avoided a simulated dynamic intruder UAV at relative speeds in excess of 100 feet per second, being initially separated by 1 mile at the outset of the encounter.</p&gt