Autonomous Navigation for Micro-Air Vehicles Using Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles
Hannah Kerner · Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2019
Our goal in this research is to develop and integrate three-dimensional collision-avoidance and navigation with physical agents, such as micro-air vehicles (MAVs). We build on prior techniques based on reciprocal velocity obstacles (RVOs) for collision-free navigation and use the ArduCopter quad-rotor helicopters, designed by 3D Robotics, as the physical agents. MAVLink, a communications protocol for micro-air vehicles, is used with the Mission Planner ground-station software providing hardware- and software-in-the-loop capabilities to interface between the quadcopters and the RVO software. We also extend RVO-based 3D collision algorithms to take into account kinematic and dynamic constraints, including bounds on the turn radius, maximum altitude, maximum velocity, etc., and highlight the results using our simulator.