Model Predictive Control With Collision Avoidance for Unknown Environment

This letter proposes a model predictive control framework to design autonomous rendezvous operations for terrestrial and space missions in the scope of spacecraft and drones, in the presence of obstacles in an unknown environment. Vehicles equipped with a LiDAR collecting points associated with the obstacles are considered. By proposing an efficient method to compute the smallest ellipse that contains the collected LiDAR points, this letter is able to correct, in run time, the vehicle trajectory to avoid collision and reach the rendezvous target. Finally, simulations of the proposed approach to show its effectiveness are presented.