Development and test of an integrated sensor system for autonomous collision avoidance

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles will have a safe access to the Civil Airspace only when they will be able to avoid collisions even with non cooperative flying obstacles. Thus, they need to replace the capability of human eye to detect potential mid-air collisions with other airframes and the pilot expertise to find an adequate voidance trajectory. This paper deals with sensors and logics equired on-board to achieve the necessary situational awareness. n particular, it refers to the research activities carried out by the Department of Aerospace Engineering of the university of Naples “Federico II” in collaboration with the Italian Center for Aerospace Research in the framework of TECVOL project. An integrated multi-sensor system is described which is comprised of a Ka-band radar, two visible and two thermal infrared cameras, and two processing units. Ground hardware-in-the-loop tests and images from first preliminary flights confirm the system potential which was estimated in past studies by off-line simulations.