A Fixed Air Corridor Model for UAS Traffic Management in Urban Areas

Aeris El Asslouj, Harshvardhan Uppaluru, Mohamadreza Ramezani, Ella Atkins, Hossein Rastgoftar

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This article develops a high-density air corridor traffic flow model for uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) operation in urban low-altitude airspace. To maximize throughput with safe separation guarantees, we define an airspace spatiotemporal planning problem. We propose a multifloor UAS coordination structure divided into a finite number of air corridors safely wrapping buildings and obstacles. We use Geographical Information System LiDAR data to map buildings and in turn generate air corridors by modeling UAS coordination as ideal fluid flow with streamlines obtained by solving the Laplace partial differential equation. Proper boundary conditions for the differential equations are imposed to direct air corridors along each floor's desired motion direction. For temporal planning, we use 4-D path-finding through the corridor network by applying the A∗ path-finding algorithm through space-time to maximize throughput given each UAS' initial and destination waypoint pair.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)5651-5662
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems
Volume60
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024

Keywords

  • Search methods
  • spatial planning
  • temporal planning
  • uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) traffic management (UTM)

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Aerospace Engineering
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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