Recovery Control for Quadrotor UAV Colliding with a Pole

Abstract

Small quadrotor UAVs are projected to fly increasingly in urban environments for a wide variety of applications such as disaster response, police surveillance, civil infrastructure inspection, and air quality measurement. Micro UAVs can detect and avoid obstacles using onboard cameras; nevertheless, disturbances such as wind gusts, operator error, or failure of onboard vision can still result in dangerous collisions with objects. In the urban setting, the most predominant obstacles are walls and poles. With the aim of developing collision recovery control solutions for quadrotor UAVs, this paper investigates the collision dynamics between a propeller-protected quadrotor UAV and a vertical pole. Simulations provide insight into a quadrotor's post-collision dynamics and experimental trials demonstrate the feasibility of autonomously recovering to stable flight using only inertial onboard sensing in real-time.