A Control Strategy for the Safe Navigation of UAVs Among Dynamic Obstacles using Real-Time Deforming Trajectories
Taha Elmokadem · 2020
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become very popular in many military and civilian applications where they are required to fly autonomously through unknown environments to perform some tasks without human interaction. Safe strategies are needed to control the motion of UAVs, and navigation decisions should be based mainly on onboard sensors observations for a fully autonomous operation. Developing such strategies is very challenging when considering dynamic environments with moving obstacles and other non-cooperative UAVs as usual path planning methods can be computationally unreliable. Hence, this work proposes a safe navigation control strategy based on the sense-and-avoid paradigm to allow for a reliable solution computational-wise. Bezier splines are used to generate motion paths which are manipulated in realtime reacting to current sensors observations resulting in a deformation-like effect to navigate safely around obstacles. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using the Gazebo simulator within a ROS framework, and good results were obtained for different simulation scenarios.