Design of a sensor suite and development of motion primitives for sUAS
Jiahao Wu · 2018
Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) are becoming popular platforms in commercial and industrial applications. sUAS is expected to become an industry of $67 billion within the next decade. However, there are unexpected risks of collision with obstacles in some situations, which exposes sUAS to damage. Thus, it brings great significance to develop a obstacle-avoidance response mechanism for sUAS before collision happens. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that prevents sUAS from hitting an obstacle on or close to the flight trajectory but flying around and pass using an updated onboard local map collected by our customized 3D Lidar system. Taking advantage of the gimbal and encoder,the raw point cloud data, will be integrated into the sUAS-FLU frame and a local map will be generated rapidly and will be further processed to decide if obstacles exist within a safety range. If the safety space is cleared of obstacles, sUAS will continue moving until an obstacle shows up and the sUAS will come to a stop first according to pre-programming. This method enables the capability that sUAS will not be damaged when running into an obstacle in all directions spatially and provides guarantee to a safe flight.