Adaptive artificial potential field approach for obstacle avoidance of unmanned aircrafts

In this paper, a novel approach for obstacle avoidance of unmanned aircrafts is introduced. To avoid collision, a potential field whose vectors are rotating around the obstacle is proposed. Most approaches using potential field in the literature repulse unmanned vehicles to get them far from obstacles. In a case that a vehicle approaches an obstacle exactly in the opposite direction of the repulsive vectors, the vehicle may locate in a local minima position and its speed converges to zero. The proposed technique in this paper considers constrains on motion control of unmanned aircrafts. The introduced rotational potential field is adaptive with the attitude of an approaching unmanned aircraft and its relative position to the obstacle to avoid making it slow down and stick in local minima positions. The simulation results confirm the feasibility of the proposed approach.