A survey of collision avoidance approaches for unmanned aerial vehicles

The ability to integrate unmanned and manned aircraft into airspace is a critical capability that will enable growth in wide varieties of applications. Collision avoidance is a key enabler for the integration of manned and unmanned missions in civil and military operation theaters. Large efforts have been done to address collision avoidance problem to both manned and unmanned aircraft. However, there has been little comparative discussion of the proposed approaches. This paper presents a survey of the collision avoidance approaches those deployed for aircraft, especially for unmanned aerial vehicles. The collision avoidance concept is introduced together with proposing generic functions carried by collision avoidance systems. The design factors of the sense and avoid system, which are used to categorize methods, are explained deeply. Based on the design factors, several typical approaches are categorized.