This academic article focuses on safe operations of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in mission-critical and safety-critical applications. It proposes a method for collision avoidance in autonomous UAVs that are tracking and following another target UAV. It is achieved by designing a safety controller that minimally modifies the control input from a trajectory tracking controller and guarantees safety. The safety controller uses a control barrier function based quadratic program to produce an optimal control input enabling safe operation while also following the trajectory of the target closely. The solution is implemented on AirSim simulator over PX4 flight controller, and its effectiveness is validated through several simulation experiments.
Publication date: 29 Dec 2023
Project Page: Not provided
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.17215
