An imminent collision monitoring system with safe stopping interventions for autonomous aerial flights

TL;DR

This paper introduces a continuous collision checking system for autonomous aerial vehicles that ensures safety by planning safe stopping trajectories, effectively reducing collision risks in uncertain environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel imminent collision monitoring and safe stopping intervention system that guarantees safety in autonomous aerial navigation under uncertain conditions.

Findings

Achieved at least 90% collision mitigation success rate.

Validated system effectiveness in real-life and simulated environments.

Demonstrated improved safety in autonomous aerial flights.

Abstract

Collision avoidance requires tradeoffs in planning time horizons. Depending on the planner, safety cannot always be guaranteed in uncertain environments given map updates. To mitigate situations where the planner leads the vehicle into a state of collision or the vehicle reaches a point where no trajectories are feasible, we propose a continuous collision checking algorithm. The imminent collision checking system continuously monitors vehicle safety, and plans a safe trajectory that leads the vehicle to a stop within the observed map. We test our proposed pipeline alongside a teleoperated navigation in real-life experiments, and in simulated random-forest and warehouse environments where we show that with our method, we are able to mitigate collisions with a success rate of at least 90\%.