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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 123 - Santa Fe, NM - March 2019
Agenda Location	7 SUBCOMMITTEE C – AVIONICS AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION 7.1 Fast, Reactive, Monocular Vision-Based Obstacle Avoidance for Small UAS
Title	Fast, Reactive, Monocular Vision-Based Obstacle Avoidance for Small UAS
Presenter	Neil Johnson
Affiliation	SSCI
Available Downloads*	presentation
	Downloads are available to members who are logged in and either Active* or attended this meeting.
Abstract	Scientific Systems has developed a unique bio-inspired obstacle avoidance capability for small unmanned air vehicles based on fast computation of expansion rate. This technology enables navigation in a complex, cluttered environment, handling both degraded GPS and GPS-denied flight regimes, while traveling at high speeds. SSCI’s system, encapsulated so far in two different efforts (R-ADVANCE and SA3), addresses this problem by using a set of biologically-inspired visual perception and reactive control algorithms, together with a basic planner, that provide low-SWAP reactive obstacle avoidance while navigating in unknown environments at high speeds (up to 40MPH) in search of a target. Various modes of perception have been demonstrated to compute expansion rate, with a primary focus on using a monocular camera for both perception and obstacle avoidance. Expansion Rate (ER), the inverse of time to contact (TTC), estimated from high frame rate imagery directly encodes collision risk. Our system incorporates this obstacle representation into a potential field, which we call the steering field, tightly linking perception and control. The steering field steers away from obstacles while steering towards a defined goal. This obstacle avoidance system has been heavily tested under the DARPA FLA (Fast, Lightweight Autonomy) program and under the SA3 program (Small, Autonomous Sensor Agnostic Sense and Avoid). Here we present results from numerous flight tests on quadrotor vehicles including flights in dense wooded areas, in cluttered areas, and at speeds up to 20 m/s.