Human-Comfortable Collision-Free Navigation for Personal Aerial Vehicles

Semi- or fully autonomous personal aerial vehicles (PAVs) are currently studied and developed by public and private organizations as a solution for traffic congestion. While optimal collision-free navigation algorithms have been proposed for autonomous robots, trajectories and accelerations for PAVs should also take into account human comfort. In this letter, we propose a reactive decentralized collision avoidance strategy that incorporates passenger physiological comfort based on the optimal reciprocal collision avoidance strategy. We study in simulation the effects of increasing PAV densities on the level of comfort, on the relative flight time and on the number of collisions per flight hour and demonstrate that our strategy reduces collision risk for platforms with limited dynamic range. Finally, we validate our strategy with a swarm of ten quadcopters flying outdoors.