Multi-Sensor-Based Fully Autonomous Non-Cooperative Collision Avoidance System for Unmanned Air Vehicles

This paper presents a fully autonomous multi-sensor anti-collision system for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. This system is being developed by the Italian Aerospace Research Center in collaboration with the Department of Aerospace Engineering of the University of Naples "Federico II". The research project is entitled TECVOL and is funded in the frame of the National Aerospace Research Program. The system prototype will be initially installed onboard a manned laboratory aircraft equipped for automatic control, therefore flight tests will verify the adequacy of attained performances for supporting fully autonomous flight. The obstacle detection and tracking function is performed by a multi-sensor configuration made up by a pulsed Ka-band radar, two visible (panchromatic and color) video cameras, two infrared video cameras, and two computers. One computer is dedicated to real time sensor fusion and communication with the radar and the flight control computer (by means of a deterministic data bus), the other is devoted to image processing. On the basis of the tracking estimates and of a Collision Avoidance Software, the flight control computer generates and follows in real-time a proper escape trajectory. In order to evaluate the performance of the collision avoidance system, numerical simulations have been performed taking into account the obstacle detection sensors' accuracy, unmanned aircraft's and intruder's flight dynamics, navigation system accuracy and latencies, and collision avoidance logic. The relevant results helped to assess overall system performances and are discussed in depth.