Unmanned Aerial Vehicle conflict detection based on spatiotemporal data grid

Abstract

—The increasing number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the complexity of the low-altitude airspace operation environment have also increased. How to efficiently solve the pre-flight UAV conflict detection problem is an important link in the low altitude airspace operation environment. This paper combines the global airspace grid coding system and the relational spatio-temporal data structure to propose a method based on spatio-temporal data grid, establishes the grid size applicable to conflict detection, and verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed UAV conflict detection type in different environments through simulation experiments. The results also show that the seventh level grid of the global airspace grid is the most suitable basic grid size, and the time consumption is reduced by about 50-75% compared with the traditional method in different scenarios.

Assessing the limits of centralized unmanned aerial vehicle conflict management in U‐Space

“…In [5] the authors simulate up to 100 UAVs, but the conflict detection part is not presented separately from the whole deconflition technique. In [6] results with 500 UAVs are shown, but the conflict detection technique is presented as part of a strategic method, applied prior to the flight time with a granularity of 1 s. Similarly, in [7], there are simulations with up to 1,200 UAVs, again prior to flight time. In our experiments, we are able to track up to 3,500 UAVs under real‐time restrictions, detecting all conflicts with a granularity of 0,5 s.…”

“…Consequently, strategic techniques are expected to introduce a poor airspace usage as detailed in [5]. [6,7] are examples of strategic methods for conflict detection. Thus, a better exploitation of the airspace is expected with techniques applied during flight time ( [2,3]).…”

“…Techniques for conflict detection close to ours are presented in [6] and [7]. In both cases, the authors propose a detection algorithm as part of a strategic deconfliction service, although they could also be used for a tactical service.…”