A velocity obstacles approach for autonomous landing and teleoperated robots

Velocity obstacles (VO) are one of the most successful methods to compute collision-free trajectory for multi-agent systems. VO provide for each autonomous robot the set of velocities that avoids collisions with other robots (sharing or not the same motion policy) and with moving or static obstacles in the environment. In this paper we will focus on a particular efficient implementation of the VO paradigm available in the literature, called optimal reciprocal collision avoidance. After highlighting and solving a couple of deadlock situations that the current implementation cannot manage, we extend this approach to two challenging applications: (1) the landing of a UAV onto a UGV in crowded environments, and (2) the generation of force feedback for teleoperated vehicles. The theoretical outcomes are validated in simulated scenarios using V-REP as a virtual robot development tool.