A Distributed Approach for Collision Avoidance between Multirotor UAVs Following Planned Missions

Abstract

As the number of potential applications for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) keeps rising steadily, the chances that these devices get close to each other during their flights also increases, causing concerns regarding potential collisions. This paper proposed the Mission Based Collision Avoidance Protocol (MBCAP), a novel UAV collision avoidance protocol applicable to all types of multicopters flying autonomously. It relies on wireless communications in order to detect nearby UAVs, and to negotiate the procedure to avoid any potential collision. Experimental and simulation results demonstrated the validity and effectiveness of the proposed solution, which typically introduces a small overhead in the range of 15 to 42 s for each risky situation successfully handled.