Towards constant velocity Navigation and collision avoidance for autonomous nonholonomic aircraft-like vehicles

This paper presents a methodology for the decentralised control of multiple 3-dimensional nonholonomic agents. The proposed control scheme is based on Navigation Functions and offers improvements compared to previous work of the authors in this field. The problem formulation is chosen to resemble Air-Traffic Management, where the safety guarantees provided by Navigation Functions based control strategies are very important. The linear velocity of each agent is maintained constant and equal to a desired value in most cases, while the azimuth and elevation control laws are engineered to reduce the required control effort. These qualitative improvements do not affect the collision avoidance characteristics of the control strategy. The performance and efficiency of our approach is supported by computer simulations presented in the paper.