Real-time UAV path-terrain collision evaluation on FPGA

One of the most fundamental element of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) path planning is the assurance that the path planned avoids any terrain collision. The task to “evaluate how much a UAV path is in collision with the terrain” is particularly crucial for path planners that are optimizing random generated paths. This terrain collision evaluation task can be computationally demanding and its computation time depends on the environment representation used. This paper presents a Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) based design of a UAV terrain collision evaluator that evaluates in parallel segments of the path in real-time. Its worst case computation time has a fixed upper bounded, based on the size of the map. For a 500×500 grid map, this upper bound is 1.9 μs, which is a promising result for future UAV real-time path planners.