Unifying Tactical Conflict Prevention, Detection, and Resolution Methods in Non-Orthogonal Constrained Urban Airspace

The use of small aircraft for a wide range of missions in urban airspace is expected to increase in the future. In Europe, efforts have been invested into developing a unified system, called U-space, to manage aircraft in dense very-low-level urban airspace. The Metropolis II project aimed to research what degree of centralisation an air traffic...

Dynamic Capacity Management for Air Traffic Operations in High Density Constrained Urban Airspace

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) is an active research subject as its proposed applications are increasing. UTM aims to enable a variety of UAS operations, including package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and emergency missions. That creates the need for extensive research on how to incorporate such traffic, as...

U-Space Utilisation of Airspace under Various Layer Function Assignments and Allocations

The interest in urban air mobility as a potential solution for urban congestion is steadily growing. Air operations in urban areas can present added complexity as compared with traditional air traffic management. As a result, it is necessary to test and develop novel airspace designs and rules. As airspace in urban areas is a scarce resource,...

Metropolis II: Benefits of Centralised Separation Management in High-Density Urban Airspace

The Metropolis II project aimed to study the impact of centralised separation management for urban aerial mobility. Three concepts were developed in this study: a fully centralised, strategically separated concept, a hybrid concept featuring cen- tralised strategic separation and distributed tactical separation, and a fully distributed tactical...

METSIS: Hyperlocal Wind Nowcasting for U-space

The METeo Sensors in the Sky (METSIS) project, funded by SESAR’s Engage knowledge transfer network, investigated the use of drones as an aerial wind sensor network for U-space applications. The concept aims to provide accurate, lowcost and hyperlocal wind nowcasts for drones using data collected by drones themselves and the Meteo-Particle Model ...

Aerial Robotics: State-based Conflict Detection and Resolution (Detect and Avoid) in High Traffic Densities and Complexities

Purpose of Review A lot of research into decentralised, state-based conflict detection and resolution, or detect and avoid algorithms has been executed. This paper explains the essential properties of state-based conflict detection and reviews the work in the context of applications for not only manned but also unmanned aerial vehicles, where...

Constrained Urban Airspace Design for Large-Scale Drone-Based Delivery Traffic

Large-scale adoption of drone-based delivery in urban areas promise societal benefits with respect to emissions and on-ground traffic congestion, as well as potential cost savings for drone-based logistic companies. However, for this to materialise, the ability of accommodating high volumes of drone traffic in an urban airspace is one of the...

Challenges with obstacle data for manned and unmanned aviation

The objective of this paper is to raise awareness about the significance of collecting and ensuring the quality of the obstacle data required for the safety of air navigation for both manned and unmanned aviation. This information could be of importance to geodetic, CityGML, 3D model and Building Information Management (BIM) community. With the...

Drone Delivery: Urban airspace traffic density estimation

The concept of autonomous drone delivery in urban areas has gained a favorable amount of media attention over the past few years. Companies such as Amazon, Uber and Matternet are investigating the use of drones to transport parcels in order to solve the disaggregate delivery (last-mile) problem. This solution could potentially reduce vehicular...

Geovectoring: Reducing Traffic Complexity to Increase the Capacity of UAV airspace

Both U-space in Europe, as well as UTM in the USA, develop concepts and tools for UAV airspace. Enabling highdensity operations is one of the goals of these studies. Past and recent studies have analysed which factors affect the capacity of a UAV airspace. An improved understanding of this can lead to control methods for capacity management. Two...

Drone Information Service Requirements for U-Space

The work presented in this paper is part of the SESAR Horizon 2020 exploratory research project DREAMS, which analyses operational and technical aspects of drone Aeronautical Information Management (AIM) for Europe’s Unmanned Traffic Management system, U-Space. The main objective of DREAMS is to analyse the present and future needs of...