This paper deals with the problem of obstacle avoidance during an automated preflight inspection. During this mission, safety appears to be a key issue, as numerous obstacles are lying in a close neighborhood of the aircraft. They are very different in terms of size, shape and mobility and are often unforeseen. To cope with this highly evolutive environment, it is necessary to design a method sufficiently generic to deal with the obstacles variety and efficient enough to guarantee non collision and avoid classical problems such as local minima, singularities, etc. In this paper, we have proposed a new sensorbased control strategy fulfilling these two requirements. It consists in defining and following an adaptative spiral around the encountered obstacles while performing preflight inspection. It relies on two main elements: (i) the definition of a spiral whose parameters are continuously updated depending on the robot motion and on the environment; (ii) the coupling of two sensorbased controllers allowing to track the spiral while avoiding singularities. Experimental results conducted on our robot show the relevance and the efficiency of the proposed control strategy.

This paper deals with the problem of navigation of unmanned vehicles through poorly known environments cluttered with static and dynamic obstacles. The robot is equipped with a LiDAR able to provide a scan of the surroundings and with classical dedicated localization sensors (odometry, IMU). The proposed navigation strategy relies on: (i) a new concept called Enhanced Laser Scan (ELS), which is built from the current laser scan by adding virtual points along the predicted trajectory of the obstacles ; (ii) two sensor-based controllers allowing respectively to reach the goal and to avoid obstacles. These controllers relying on the richer information provided by the ESL, they will be able to anticipate and safely avoid both static and moving obstacles ; (iii) a high-level decision process allowing a better choice of the sense-of-motion (SOM) around the obstacle and its reassessment if needed.

This paper deals with the problem of navigating through a poorly known environment cluttered with both static and dynamic obstacles. The proposed strategy relies on two controllers allowing to reach the goal and to avoid the obstacles. Two contributions can be highlighted: (i) the definition of a safe avoidance distance which can be adequately modified during the mission if a moving obstacle is encountered; and (ii) the choice of a sense of motion depending on the obstacle motion. Simulation results validate the proposed strategy.