The utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles requires the ability to navigate in urban or unknown terrain where many moving and/or stationary obstacles of different types and sizes may endanger the safety of the mission. Large efforts have been addressed to resolve conflicts to unmanned aircraft. This paper explores the fundamental concept and presents an up-to-date survey of the collision sensing, detection and resolution methods those deployed for aircraft, especially for unmanned aerial vehicles. The collision avoidance concept is demonstrated through proposing generic functions carried by collision avoidance systems with special emphasis on the context aware implementation. These functions are then presented together with design factors that are used then to classify major collision avoidance methods.