Fly Crash Recover: A Sensor based Reactive Framework for Online Collision Recovery of UAVs

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly popular thanks to the multiplicity of operations in which they can be deployed such as surveillance, search and rescue, mapping, transportation, hobby and recreational activities. Although sensors like LIDARs and cameras are often present on such systems for motion planning to avoid obstacles, collisions can still occur in very dense and unstructured environments, especially if disturbances are present. In this work, we research techniques to recover UAVs after a collision has occurred. We note that the on-board sensors, especially the inertial sensor used to stabilize the UAV, run at a high frequencies obtaining hundreds of data points every second. At run-time, this can be leveraged at the moment of a collision to quickly detect and recover the system. Our approach considers knowledge of UAV system dynamics to predict the expected behavior of the …