Collision Avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Collision avoidance for Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) is a necessity if the UAV is to fly in an area whereby the terrain is unknown. Collision avoidance is a field widely researched on especially amongst the robotics community. But most of the existing collision avoidance algorithms require knowledge of terrain and even the location of the obstacles with respect to the robot. A particular study approached collision avoidance from a missile guidance point of view and hence is especially applicable to flight platforms maneuvering in an unknown terrain. The result is a modified version of the Proportional Navigation (PN) guidance law that serves as a collision avoidance algorithm. This report seeks to verify the PN collision avoidance algorithm. A flight platform with the sensory and control equipment necessary for implementing the PN collision avoidance algorithm is put together to realize the algorithm in actual hardware. Results are then collected and a detailed comparison between the theoretical calculated results and the actual results is made to measure the actual performance of the algorithm.