A Novel Collision Avoidance Method for Multiple Fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this paper, we study the collision avoidance problem with fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). According to the relative spatial position and speed between the drones, the non-conflicting sufficient conditions for conflict detection are proposed. Then an emergency collison avoidance control law is designed based on the proposed conditions to ensure that the UAVs can be driven back to safe state from danger when emergent conflict are detected. Furthermore, a conflict buffer is additionally introduced to prevent frequent switching of control outputs between the “safe mode” and “danger mode”. The proposed control strategy cannot only tackle two-UAV conflict scenarios, but has also been extended to multi-UAV conflict scenarios with several additional motion rules. Meanwhile, control input saturation is explicitly considered in the emergency maneuver. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.