MBCAP: Mission Based Collision Avoidance Protocol for UAVs

Abstract

The number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) flying around is increasing year after year due to their popularity. This new scenario considerably increases the risk of collision among them, which makes the development of protocols to avoid this issue an emerging topic. This work focuses on the development of a collision avoidance protocol between multicopters performing planned missions. Our proposal is based on the periodic submission of state information, and estimations concerning future UAV positions, allowing collision risks to be detected early. Collision avoidance is achieved by forcing UAVs to stop when they are flying critically near each other, and establishing a priority to determine which UAV shall go through the critical area first; this decision is based on a per-UAV unique identifier. We prove that our solution is robust enough to avoid collisions in all the situations tested; in addition, the overhead introduced by our protocol in terms of additional UAV flight time is low.