Digital Twin-Based Collision Avoidance Planning and Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Dynamic Obstacles

In this paper, an autonomous navigation and control method is proposed based on digital twin (DT) to resolve path conflict when two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) move towards each other. A four-dimensional digital twin system is introduced, encompassing physical space, virtual space, application service, and data processing. To deal with a dynamic obstacle in the physical space, a collision avoidance planning algorithm is developed by combining MINCO and time elastic band (TEB) for a virtual UAV and a physical UAV. To ensure motion synchronization between the virtual UAV and the physical UAV, a bidirectional synchronization control strategy is proposed based on adaptive event-triggered model predictive control (ETMPC). Experiment results demonstrate effectiveness and superiority of the collision avoidance planning algorithm and the bidirectional synchronization control strategy.