Quadrotor collision characterization and recovery control

Abstract

Collisions between quadrotor UAVs and the environment often occur, for instance, under faulty piloting, from wind gusts, or when obstacle avoidance fails. Airspace regulations are forcing drone companies to build safer drones; many quadrotor drones now incorporate propeller protection. However, propeller protected quadrotors still do not detect or react to collisions with objects such as walls, poles and cables. In this paper, we present a collision recovery pipeline which controls propeller protected quadrotors to recover from collisions. This pipeline combines concepts from impact dynamics, fuzzy logic, and aggressive quadrotor attitude control. The strategy is validated via a comprehensive Monte Carlo simulation of collisions against a wall, showing the feasibility of recovery from challenging collision scenarios. The pipeline is implemented on a custom experimental quadrotor platform, demonstrating feasibility of real-time performance and successful recovery from a range of pre-collision conditions. The ultimate goal of the research is to implement a general collision recovery solution as a safety feature for quadrotor flight controllers.