Development of a Sense and Avoid System for Small Fixed-Wing UAV

December 3, 2024

Given the rising number of applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and consequent expansion of that market, enhanced flight safety systems need to be developed. The main objective of this work is to develop a Sense and Avoid (S\&A) system for small fixed-wing UAVs. To achieve this, firstly, a comprehensive literature review of the sensors and systems used to detect obstacles, cooperatively and non-cooperatively, was made, followed by a review of the main local and global path planning methods for collision avoidance. Then, a hardware implementation was proposed, consisting of two ultrasonic sensors, two laser rangefinders, and one LiDAR, integrated with a flight controller, a companion computer, and other components essential to the UAV operation. A complete software implementation was also proposed, ranging from the study and adaptation of the flight control software (PX4), with emphasis on the handle and communication of sensor data, to the development of a software prototype, based on the Vector Field Histogram (VFH) method, to be executed in the companion computer, to receive sensor data, obtain obstacle positions, and return setpoints of a collision avoidance trajectory. The validation tests have shown that the system is capable of, based on sensor data, compute obstacle positions, transform them to polar histogram format, and generate trajectory setpoints representing avoidance maneuvers of small deviations, with an update rate of 10Hz, thus real-time capable.

Authors in the community:

• 

  B

  Bruno Manuel Bento Pedro

  ist196363

Supervisors of this institution:

• 

  A

  André Calado Marta

  ist31052

mechanical-engineering - Mechanical engineering

por - Portuguese

Instituto Superior Técnico