I used to work in perception for autonomous aerial vehicles and horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid. Traditional stereo won't help you localize them -- wires are thin so even mere detection can be hard, and one portion of a wire looks much like another so feature matching fails resulting in bad or no depth estimates -- and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption (which both h…
> Traditional stereo won't help you localize them [...] and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption I wonder if a more mechanical solution wouldn't help: Whiskers, like on a cat. A long enough set of thin lightweight whiskers could touch the wire before the propellers do, giving time for the drone to stop and change course. Essentially, giving the drone a sense of touch.
Doesn't protect against everything, like Spanish Moss which dangles from trees, but that is a lot bigger than a long thin wire.