Optimized and Trusted Collision Avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles using Approximate Dynamic Programming (Technical Report)

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive collision avoidance system for UAVs that dynamically tunes trusted resolution logic parameters using approximate dynamic programming, enhancing safety and performance.

Contribution

It presents a novel online parameter adaptation method for collision avoidance, combining trustworthiness with improved operational efficiency.

Findings

Enhanced safety in UAV collision avoidance

Improved operational performance over static logic

Retained trustworthiness of the system

Abstract

Safely integrating unmanned aerial vehicles into civil airspace is contingent upon development of a trustworthy collision avoidance system. This paper proposes an approach whereby a parameterized resolution logic that is considered trusted for a given range of its parameters is adaptively tuned online. Specifically, to address the potential conservatism of the resolution logic with static parameters, we present a dynamic programming approach for adapting the parameters dynamically based on the encounter state. We compute the adaptation policy offline using a simulation-based approximate dynamic programming method that accommodates the high dimensionality of the problem. Numerical experiments show that this approach improves safety and operational performance compared to the baseline resolution logic, while retaining trustworthiness.