A Time-Efficient Method to Avoid Collisions for Collision Cones: An Implementation for UAVs Navigating in Dynamic Environments

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology that can be used to avoid collisions of aerial drones. Even though there are many collision avoidance methods available in literature, collision cone is a proven method that can be used to predict a collision beforehand. In this research, we propose an algorithm to avoid a collision in a time-efficient manner for collision cone based aerial collision avoidance approaches. Furthermore, the paper has considered all possible scenarios including heading change, speed change and combined heading and speed change, to avoid a collision. The heading-based method was mathematically proven to be the most time-efficient method out of the three. The proposed heading-based method was compared with other work presented in the literature and validated with both simulations and experiments. A Matrice 600 Pro hexacopter is used for the collision avoidance experiments.