Collision Avoidance Based on Line-of-Sight Angle: Guaranteed Safety Using Limited Information About the Obstacle

This paper focuses on the problem of collision avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The dynamics of the UAV are modeled as a Dubins vehicle flying at constant altitude. The angular velocity is used as control input in order to avert a possible collision with a single obstacle, while the speed is left as an extra degree of freedom to achieve some temporal requirements. The proposed control algorithm uses only the line-of-sight angle as feedback: in this sense, the main contribution of this paper is providing a solution to the collision avoidance problem that can be used in situations where it is not possible to measure data such as position and velocity of the obstacle. A theoretical analysis of the result is provided, followed by simulation results that validate the efficacy of the control strategy.