Abstract
With the increasing application of unmanned aircraft in civil airspace, collision avoidance systems for unmanned aircraft are becoming more and more important and valuable. An ideal collision avoidance system gives the aircraft an optimal strategy for choosing flight actions to avoid collision risks when it detects other aircraft nearby. Currently the general approach to generating collision avoidance logics is to model the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and then synthesize an optimal policy. However, the existing systems require the precise position information of the intruder aircraft to generate the avoidance actions and ignore the effects of the flight path changes, which may result in its lower robustness or a wasting of flying resources.
In this paper, we construct a collision avoidance system based on limited information that reduces the variations from the original flight path. We use POMDPs to model the collision avoidance system with only the destination information of our own aircraft and rough information about the intruder position and generate the collision resolution logic. We implement the collision avoidance module, embed it into the real unmanned aircraft system over PX4 flight control platform and demonstrate the effectiveness of our system by flight simulation.
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Notes
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https://dev.px4.io/master/en/index.html, PX4 Development Guide.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are very thankful to Xuechao Sun and Junwen Li for helpful discussion and the assembly of the Pixhawk drone. This work has been supported by the Guangdong Science and Technology Department (grant no. 2018B010107004), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (grant no. 2019A1515011689), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 61761136011, 61532019, 61836005).
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Feng, W., Huang, CC., Turrini, A., Li, Y. (2020). Modelling and Implementation of Unmanned Aircraft Collision Avoidance. In: Pang, J., Zhang, L. (eds) Dependable Software Engineering. Theories, Tools, and Applications. SETTA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12153. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62822-2_4
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