Potential Field Based Inter-UAV Collision Avoidance Using Virtual Target Relocation

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Potential Field Based Inter-UAV Collision Avoidance Using Virtual Target Relocation

Abeywickrama, Hasini Viranga / Jayawickrama, Beeshanga Abewardana / He, Ying / Dutkiewicz, Eryk

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are becoming popular in a range of areas. This has given rise to the concept of UAV swarms, where multiple UAVs act together to achieve a common task. With multiple UAVs flying in close proximity to each other, sharing the same airspace, the risk of inter-UAV collisions increases. It's important to avoid these collisions while having minimal impact on the UAV system. We propose a novel Potential Field Method (PFM) based algorithm for inter-UAV collision avoidance which considerably reduces the total time taken by the UAV system to achieve its goal. We control the collision avoidance actions of the UAVs by virtually relocating their targets. The positions of the virtual targets are calculated to minimize the collision probability, based on a probability function we introduced. The proposed algorithm reduces the total system time approximately by 20\% as opposed to the traditional PFM.