Reciprocal Geometric Conflict Resolution on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles by Heading Control

Abstract

This paper presents a novel geometry-based distributed cooperative conflict resolution method for unmanned aerial vehicles to autonomously handle distributed multiple encounters in an integrated airspace. First, the safe separation constraint of pairwise conflicts is studied, with consideration given to the periodic features of the tangent function. Second, the nonlinear safe separation constraint is transformed into a linear constraint through mapping the constraint relationship from the degree space into the sin value space. A consensus-guaranteed rule is designed to decouple the conflict resolution responsibilities of pairwise conflict-related unmanned aerial vehicles from the obtained linear constraint. Each unmanned aerial vehicle can compute its feasible maneuver range individually. Third, a short-term conflict resolution object function is designed, and a reciprocal geometric conflict resolution algorithm is proposed. The proposed method is tested in several simulations and compared with existing algorithms. The results show that the reciprocal geometric conflict resolution method is capable of resolving various conflicts, is robust to time delay, and outperforms existing algorithms in reducing conflict avoidance cost.