Implementing Obstacle Avoidance For A Smooth Quadcopter Flight

Abstract

Over the last few years we have seen a massive growth in the manufacture and sales of remote control airborne vehicles known as Quadcopters. These Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have four arms and fixed pitch propellers which are set in an X or + configuration with X being the preferred configuration. They are sometimes referred to as Drones, Quadro- tors or Quadrocopters. In the standard format two propellers will spin in a clockwise direction with the other two spinning in an anticlockwise direction allowing the craft to vertically ascend, hover in the air and fly in a designated direction. The Quadcopter is a simple format with very few moving parts and has rapidly become a favourite vehicle for remote control enthusiasts and is widely being used as an effective Aerial photographic platform. An effective reactive collision avoidance algorithm is presented for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using simple pinhole camera based passive stereovision sensing. The vision sensed data is processed through visual slam to estimate the position and velocity of the obstacle.