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Collision Avoidance for Multiple UAVs Using Rolling-Horizon Policy

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Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of collision avoidance in scenarios with multiple aerial vehicles and proposes a method based on a Legendre pseudospectral collocation in order to compute the solution trajectories and guarantee that the safety distance between them is always maintained. The method uses a rolling horizon policy in which trajectories are planned up to a given time horizon, thus considering a much smaller problem space. Then, the system is applied iteratively. Studies have been performed to set the values of the look-ahead time and the number of collocations points. The computational load and scalability of the method are also studied in randomly generated scenarios to test its application in real time. Experiments have been also carried out in the multivehicle aerial testbed of the Center for Advanced Aerospace Technologies (Seville, Spain).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics, Vision and Control Group, Engineering School, University of Seville, 41092, Seville, Spain

    Santiago Vera, José Antonio Cobano, Guillermo Heredia & Aníbal Ollero

Authors
  1. Santiago Vera
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  2. José Antonio Cobano
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  3. Guillermo Heredia
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  4. Aníbal Ollero
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to José Antonio Cobano.

Additional information

This work was supported by the European Commission FP7 ICT Programme under the EC-SAFEMOBIL project (288082) and the CLEAR project (DPI2011-28937-C02-01) funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion of the Spanish Government. The authors would like to thank Mr. Miguel Angel Trujillo for their unselfish help during the development of the experiments in the testbed of CATEC (Seville).

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Vera, S., Cobano, J.A., Heredia, G. et al. Collision Avoidance for Multiple UAVs Using Rolling-Horizon Policy. J Intell Robot Syst 84, 387–396 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0291-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0291-2

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