Practical Control for Multicopters to Avoid Non-Cooperative Moving Obstacles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are now becoming increasingly accessible to amateur and commercial users alike. The main task for UAVs is to keep a prescribed separation with obstacles in the air. In this paper, a collision-avoidance control method for non-cooperative moving obstacles is proposed for a multicopter with the altitude hold mode by using a Lyapunov-like barrier function. Lyapunov-like functions are designed elaborately, based on which formal analysis and proofs of the proposed control are made to show that the collision-avoidance control problem can be solved if the moving obstacle is slower than the multicopter. The result can be extended to some cases of multiple obstacles. What is more, by the proposed control, a multicopter can keep away from obstacles as soon as possible once obstacles enter into the safety area of the multicopter accidentally and converge to the waypoint. Simulations and experiments are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method by showing the distance from UAV to waypoint and obstacles.