Autonomous UAV object Avoidance with Floyd-warshall differential evolution approach

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are recently focused with significant research attention from commercial to military industries. Due to its wide range of applications such as traffic monitoring, surveillance, aerial photograph and rescue mission, many research studies were conducted related to UAV development. UAV are commonly called as ‘drones’ used to suit dull, dangerous and dirty missions that can be suited by manned aircraft. UAV can be controlled either remotely or using automation approaches so that it can be travelled into predefined path. To make the autonomous UAV, the most complex issue that is faced by UAV is obstacle / object avoidance. Obstacle detection and avoidance are important for UAV and it is the complex problem to solve due to the payload restriction. This will limit the sensor count mounted on the vehicle. Radar was used to find the distance between the object and vehicle. This can help to detect and track the moving objects speed and direction towards the vehicle. This paper considered the object avoidance problem as path planning problem. There were many path planning methods related to UAV which formulates the path planning as an optimization problem to avoid the obstacles. With the consideration, this paper proposed an efficient and optimal approach called Floyd Warshall- Differential evolution (FWDE) approach to detect the frontal obstacles of UAV. Finally, statistical analysis of the simulated environment reveals that the proposed evolutionary method can efficiently avoid both static and dynamic objects for UAVs. This efficient avoidance algorithm for UAV can be experimented with simulation environment with three kinds of scenarios having different number of cells. The obtained accuracy and recall value of the proposed system is 95.21% and 91.56%.