Reactive Collision Avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles using Doppler Radar

Andrew Viquerat (1) , Lachlan Blackhall (1) , Alistair Reid (1) , Salah Sukkarieh (2) , Graham Brooker (2)

1 School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering
2 CAS - ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems

Research into reactive collision avoidance for unmanned aerial vehicles has been conducted on unmanned terrestrial and mini aerial vehicles utilising active Doppler radar obstacle detection sensors. Flight tests conducted by flying a mini UAV at an obstacle have confirmed that a simple reactive collision avoidance algorithm enables aerial vehicles to autonomously avoid obstacles. This builds upon simulation work and results obtained using a terrestrial vehicle that had already confirmed that active sensors and a reactive collision avoidance algorithm are able to successfully find a collision free path through an obstacle field.

Domains: Robotics [cs.RO]

Andrew Viquerat, Lachlan Blackhall, Alistair Reid, Salah Sukkarieh, Graham Brooker. Reactive Collision Avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles using Doppler Radar. 6th International Conference on Field and Service Robotics - FSR 2007, Jul 2007, Chamonix, France. ⟨inria-00195933⟩