Collision Avoidance Strategies for Cooperative Unmanned Aircraft Systems using Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

A massive increase is expected in the use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) for civilian applications in the near future. Such high-density traffic, especially in urban settings, leads to an elevated risk of collisions in civilian airspaces. Existing collision avoidance solutions that are primarily developed for manned aircraft are not portable to autonomous vehicles and are not sufficiently capable of handling high-volume traffic. Standards organizations such as IEEE, Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, and General Aviation Manufacturers Association are working towards developing collision avoidance strategies for cooperative UASs based on Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications. This paper presents collision avoidance methods for cooperative UASs in structured and unstructured airspaces using V2V communications. It highlights a use-case scenario "Crossroads," to demonstrate the proposed collision avoidance strategies. Results obtained through simulations carried out using AirSim are also presented.