A Comparative Study of Collision Avoidance Techniques for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this paper three collision avoidance methods for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are tested and compared to one another. The quadrocopter dynamic model with attitude and velocity controller, a trajectory generator and a selection of collision avoidance approaches were implemented. The first collision avoidance method is based on a geometric approach which computes a direction of avoidance from the flight direction and simple geometric equations. The second technique uses virtual repulsive force fields causing the UAV to be repelled by obstacles. The last method is a grid-based online path re-planning algorithm with A* search that finds a collision free path during flight. Various flight scenarios were defined including static and dynamic obstacles.