A Control of Multiple Drones for Automatic Collision Avoidance

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are often used in hazardous missions. Many models, sizes and types are available for different usages. A well-known type of UAV is “drone”, which is controlled by a remote controller via radio wave. These drones have internal memory and use battery for energy source. At present, commercial off-the-shelf drones are subject to human manual control, which can only control one drone at a time. In order to enable autonomous control of multiple drones, the detection of objects around the drones and collision avoidance mechanism are necessary.

This paper presents a control of multiple drones for automatic collision avoidance by using a detection device that is composed of ultrasonic sensors and an embedded control device to detect objects in four directions. A collision avoidance algorithm is designed based on the object detection to enable automatic avoidance. The result has shown that the detection device and the collision avoidance algorithm can work with an accuracy greater than 90%.