Learning-to-Fly (L2F): Learning-based mission-aware Collision Avoidance

Overview

In order for fleets of drones managed by different operators to share an airspace, they require a fast, reliable and fair Collision Avoidance (CA) approach to ensure safety. This project aims to develop such methods by combining learning-based decision making and decentralized Model Predictive Control to perform on-the-fly, predictive Collision Avoidance (CA) between two (co-operative) drones. In addition to performing CA in real-time, L2F also ensures that the drones do not violate their original mission requirements. The video below shows a simulation where two pairs of drones are have conflicting pre-planned trajectories, and also shows the resulting safe trajectories obtained via L2F.

Publications

  • Mission-aware, Learning-to-Fly: Learning-based Collision Avoidance for Scalable Urban Air Mobility
    Rodionova, Pant, Jang, Abbas, Mangharam
    IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2020.

  • Learning-to-Fly RL: Reinforcement Learning-based Collision Avoidance for Scalable Urban Air Mobility
    Jang, Pant, Rodionova, Mangharam
    AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), 2020.

Contributors

Rodionova, Pant, Jang, Abbas, Mangharam

Citation


@misc{rodionova2020learningtoflylearningbasedcollisionavoidance,
      title={Learning-to-Fly: Learning-based Collision Avoidance for Scalable Urban Air Mobility}, 
      author={Alëna Rodionova and Yash Vardhan Pant and Kuk Jang and Houssam Abbas and Rahul Mangharam},
      year={2020},
      eprint={2006.13267},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={eess.SY},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.13267}, 
}

Latest Posts

30th Roboracer Autonomous Racing Competition at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2026)
30th Roboracer Autonomous Racing Competition at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2026)

The 2026 IEEE 104th Vehicular Technology Conference: VTC2026-Fall will be held in Boston, MA, USA, 6 - 9 September, 2026. This semi-annual flagship conference of IEEE Vehicular Technology Society will bring together individuals from academia, government, and industry to discuss and exchange ideas in the fields of wireless, mobile, and vehicular technology.

29th Roboracer Autonomous Racing Competition at the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC 2026)
29th Roboracer Autonomous Racing Competition at the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC 2026)

The teams participating in 29th Roboracer Autonomous Racing Competition at IFAC 2026 will build a 1:10 scaled autonomous race car according to a given specification and write software for it to fulfill the objectives for the competition.

28th Roboracer Autonomous Racing Competition at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV 2026)
28th Roboracer Autonomous Racing Competition at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV 2026)

The teams participating in 28TH Roboracer Racing Competition at ICRA 2026 will build a 1:10 scaled autonomous race car according to a given specification and write software for it to fulfill the objectives for the competition: Don't crash and minimize laptime.