Cooperative Sense and Avoid: Implementation in Simulation and Real World for Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this paper we present a framework and a method for sense and avoid to be used with unmanned areial sytems (UAS). The framework is an essential part to develop and validate the sense and avoidance algorithms. It is implemented and used for simulation and on a real system by using a common interface. The avoidance method in this paper is based on the fact that the intruder vehicle has certain limitations in turn rate and acceleration or deceleration. This is used to define the geometry of the threat zone for every intruder. In comparison to other geometry based algorithms the presented method uses the abilities (type) of the intruding aircraft and its current state. Diverse scenarios have been simulated successfully in that framework and code for the real system was generated and implemented.