Collision Detection for UAVs Based on GeoSOT-3D Grids

Abstract

The increasing number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has led to challenges related to solving the collision problem to ensure air traffic safety. The traditional approaches employed for collision detection suffer from two main drawbacks: first, the computational burden of a pairwise calculation increases exponentially with an increasing number of spatial entities; second, existing grid-based approaches are unsuitable for complicated scenarios with a large number of objects moving at high speeds. In the proposed model, we first identified UAVs and other spatial objects with GeoSOT-3D grids. Second, the nonrelational spatial database was initialized with a multitable strategy, and spatiotemporal data were inserted with the GeoSOT-3D grid codes as the primary key. Third, the collision detection procedure was transformed from a pairwise calculation to a multilevel query. Four simulation experiments were conducted to verify the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed collision detection model for UAVs in different environments. The results also indicated that 64 m GeoSOT-3D grids are the most suitable basic grid size, and the reduction in the time consumption compared with traditional methods reached approximately 50–80% in different scenarios.