Small UAV High-speed Obstacle and Collision Avoidance

A major roadblock towards full UAV deployment in urban and mountainous areas is their inability to negotiate obstacles and avoid collision with other aircraft while flying at or near cruise speed. There is an urgent need for UAV obstacle and collision detection and avoidance systems, which won't slow down the UAV significantly while analyzing the world and making decisions as to what is the safest route around obstacles and other aircraft. We propose to design and test a low weight, low power, and low cost UAV obstacle and collision detection and avoidance system. We will pursue an approach based on combining laser-, vision-, and acoustic-based systems. We also propose to develop route deconfliction and autonomous obstacle and collision avoidance methods. We will develop aircraft guidance, or planning, methodologies that take into account the amount and type of information provided by the sensors. To minimize data processing latency we propose to closely integrate the sensors and the corresponding pre-processing algorithms.By developing hardware and software in a modular way, we will be able to provide the maximum possible capabilities for each type of UAV at the right weight, power, and cost levels.