A Review on Collision Avoidance Systems for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) concept has attracted the attention of both academia and industry as an alternative to reduce the traffic congestion limitation. To coordinate the UAVs located in the sky, also called drones, the concept of the Internet of Drones (IoD) was introduced as overall coordination of UAVs in the sky. IoD paradigm offers a wide range of applications mainly targeting the military and civilian environments. Some of those applications include transportation, agriculture-based systems, entertainment, weather monitoring, healthcare systems, and road hazards monitoring. However, once an area is highly congested by a various number of drones, dynamic or statics obstacles can hinder the overall performance of drones. In order to avoid those obstacles, one of the proposed solutions is to apply collision avoidance techniques while the drones are on duty. In this paper, we present a brief survey of collision avoidance systems for the internet of drones. We have reviewed the current literature review ranging from the year 2010 to 2021. This work has taken into consideration two main frequently used databases in academia: Xplore for IEEE and ScienceDirect for Elsevier. After article selection, some articles were retained and discussed. A detailed discussion and analysis of selected articles were made while most of the techniques used in collision avoidance systems include video-based systems and swarm-based intelligence approaches. Furthermore, the paper discusses the different approaches which are used to design collision avoidance systems. Finally, this paper provides concluding remarks and future research orientation that will mainly focus on AI-based algorithms applied in collision avoidance systems.

I. Introduction

By definition, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot on-board [1]. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), which includes additionally a ground-based controller and a system of communications with the UAV. On the other hand, the Internet of Drones (IoD) consists of many drones that can communicate and share information in the perspective of monitoring or reporting an event that has occurred in a certain place or region. Drones are also defined as aircraft-based devices that can fly or operate with passengers [2]. The Internet of drones is applicable in a multitude of areas mostly in the civilian environment. Those areas of applications include traffic monitoring, packets or good delivery, accident detection systems, agriculture inspection, and monitoring systems, emergency and rescue-based systems. Drones are also widely used in the military domain with many applications and events already documented in the literature.