UAS aided landing and obstacle detection through LIDAR-Sonar data

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) have gained large consensus during the last decade, due to their versatility in military and civilian tasks. For some operations, it is necessary to have a good sensor embedded platform that allows navigation in unknown environment. This paper shows the use of low-cost sensors fusion for obstacle detection and avoidance: Sonic ranger (SR) and Light detection and ranging (LIDAR). Further sensors are also installed on the UAS (e.g. ADXL335 3-axis accelerometer), in order to have redundant information for the relative position evaluation. Simulation and experimental results are provided to determine feasibility of the proposed approach to detection and avoidance applications on a small rotary wing UAS.