Collision Avoidance for Micro Air Vehicles

It is proposed to further develop, flight demonstrate and transition a robust capability to autonomously detect and avoid obstacles typically encountered in flight by fixed or rotary wing micro air vehicles during low-altitude urban operations. There are two basic elements: (1) continually detecting and modeling the observable 3-D obstacle field in real-time, and (2) autonomously guiding the vehicle to accomplish a given set of mission objectives while ensuring there are no collisions with obstacles. A key innovation of the proposed approach is maturation of a technique to accomplish the stated objective that requires only a single 2-D image stream (a stream available on essentially every unmanned air vehicle in the inventory today). A key technical challenge is to realize the system in hardware that simultaneously meets demand for real-time execution of computationally intense algorithms and severe constraints on subsystem mass, volume and power consumption. Demonstrated phase I algorithms will immediately move into practical implementation and evaluation on an existing low-cost surrogate flight test vehicle using commercial-off-the-shelf FPGA hardware. Hardware and software design specific to integration on the Wasp micro air vehicle will proceed in parallel. Flight demonstration of the developed technology on the production Wasp vehicle is proposed as a program option.