Anti-Collision Technologies for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Recent Advances and Future Trends

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely applied in civil applications, such as disaster relief, agriculture and cargo transportation, and so on. With the massive number of UAV flight activities, the anti-collision technologies aiming to avoid the collisions between UAVs and other objects have attracted much attention. The anti-collision technologies are of vital importance to guarantee the survivability and safety of UAVs. In this article, a comprehensive survey on UAV anti-collision technologies is presented. We firstly introduce laws and regulations on UAV safety which prevent a collision at the policy level. Then, the process of anti-collision technologies is reviewed from three aspects, i.e., obstacle sensing, collision prediction, and collision avoidance. We provide a detailed survey and comparison of the methods of each aspect and analyze their pros and cons. Besides, the future trends on UAV anti-collision technologies are presented from the perspective of fast obstacle sensing and fast wireless networking. Finally, we summarize this article.