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

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.