Reachability-Based Safety and Goal Satisfaction of Unmanned Aerial Platoons on Air Highways

Abstract

Recently, there has been immense interest in using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for civilian operations. As a result, unmanned aerial systems traffic management is needed to ensure the safety and goal satisfaction of potentially thousands of UAVs flying simultaneously. Currently, the analysis of large multi-agent systems cannot tractably provide these guarantees if the agents' set of maneuvers is unrestricted. In this paper, platoons of UAVs flying on air highways is proposed to impose an airspace structure that allows for tractable analysis. For the air highway placement problem, the fast marching method is used to produce a sequence of air highways that minimizes the cost of flying from an origin to any destination. The placement of air highways can be updated in real-time to accommodate sudden airspace changes. Within platoons traveling on air highways, each vehicle is modeled as a hybrid system. Using Hamilton-Jacobi reachability, safety and goal satisfaction are guaranteed for all mode transitions. For a single altitude range, the proposed approach guarantees safety for one safety breach per vehicle; in the unlikely event of multiple safety breaches, safety can be guaranteed over multiple altitude ranges. We demonstrate the platooning concept through simulations of three representative scenarios.

Optimization approaches for civil applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or aerial drones: A survey

“…Chen et al investigate drone‐only air highways. The authors argue that although air highways will potentially increase the travel distances for drones, they offer major advantages by avoiding (reducing) multiway conflicts and, thus, reducing the likelihood of collisions.…”

“…The authors argue that although air highways will potentially increase the travel distances for drones, they offer major advantages by avoiding (reducing) multiway conflicts and, thus, reducing the likelihood of collisions. Chen et al offer a methodology to determine location of an air highway and propose control strategies for drones when they join the highway traffic and travel as leaders or followers of emerging platoons. Richert and Cortes observe that, similar to platooning for conventional trucks , flying in a formation enables the drones that are following the lead drone to consume less energy.…”

Verification of the control system performance using viability theory

“…Reachability analysis is widely used in this area as an acceptable tool for verification [1]. Safety of the system is a major issue that is investigated using reachability analysis [2]. There is also a rich literature in experimental verification of control systems [3], [4], [5].…”

Evaluating Risk to People and Property for Aircraft Emergency Landing Planning

“…Data link enables updated information to be accessed in real time. Databases and data link can also be used to determine low-risk UAS flight paths or for UAS highway definition as proposed by [4]. This paper proposes the Fig.…”

“…= total number of country codes n g = total number of grid cells n t = total number of time intervals R a = risk based on landing area R h = risk to people on ground R ls = overall landing site risk R p = risk to property on ground R v = risk to vehicle t = time, min t 10 m = starting time of 10 min time interval, min W h , W p , W v , W a = weights associated with landing site risks w = A transition cost weight Θ = median of maximum aggregated SMS and call activity during a day, for a day of the week λ census = occupancy from census datâ λ census = normalized occupancy from census data λ rt = real-time occupancy estimation λ 0 = A fixed transition cost element Φ = median of aggregated SMS and call activity for each grid cell, day of the week and time interval of the day Φ grid = sum of Φ for all grid cellŝ Φ = normalized Φ ϕ = aggregated SMS and call activitŷ ϕ = normalized ϕ ϕ 1 = activity in terms of SMS-in ϕ 2 = activity in terms of SMS-out ϕ 3 = activity in terms of call-in ϕ 4 = activity in terms of call-out ϕ 5 = activity in terms of internet ϕ i = modified activity feature for heat map plot ϕ i avg = average activity in terms of feature i throughout the entire database ϕ grid = sum of ϕ for all grid cells I. Introduction T RIPLY redundant commercial transport aircraft are rarely forced to land off-runway, but emergency landings are occasionally required today in general aviation and experimental aircraft operations.…”