Integrated Collision Avoidance for Unmanned Aircraft Systems with Harmonic Potential Field and Haptic Input

The growing interest and trend for deploying unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in civil applications requires robust traffic management approaches that can safely integrate the unmanned platforms into the airspace. Although there have been significant advances in autonomous navigation, especially in the ground vehicles domain, there are still challenges to address for navigation in the dynamic 3D environment that airspace presents. An integrated approach that facilitates semi-autonomous operations in dynamic environments and also allows for operators to stay in the loop for intervention may provide a workable and practical solution for UAS integration in the airspace. In this paper, a new integrated approach is presented for the problem of collision avoidance that applies a variant of potential field method along with haptic-based tele-operation for added safety in high-risk situations.