Distributed reactive collision avoidance

Distributed Reactive Collision Avoidance Emmett Lalish Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Kristi A. Morgansen Aeronautics and Astronautics Collision avoidance is an important aspect of multivehicle coordination because it prevents vehicles from disrupting or destroying each other. The work contained in this dissertation concerns a novel approach to the n-vehicle collision avoidance problem. The vehicle model used here allows for three-dimensional movement and represents a wide range of vehicles. The algorithm works in conjunction with any desired controller to guarantee all vehicles remain free of collisions while attempting to follow their desired control. This algorithm is reactive and distributed, making it well-suited for real-time applications, and explicitly accounts for actuation limits. A robustness analysis is presented which provides a means to account for delays and unmodeled dynamics. Robustness to an adversarial vehicle is also presented.