Drones are expected to support applications such as emergency response, parcel delivery, and infrastructure monitoring in dense urban airspaces, creating traffic levels that are unmanageable for human operators. Autonomous separation management is therefore essential, combining strategic and tactical control to prevent conflicts. This paper addresses the tactical landing phase by introducing a centralized landing flow manager—a reinforcement learning (RL) agent that adjusts drone speed and heading to merge landing flows safely and efficiently prior to a final approach fix. The objective of the work was to demonstrate the potential of reinforcement learning in this novel context, by implementing and evaluating it in simulation and testing its capabilities with 10 concurrent landing drones. The RL agent learns to successfully separate traffic, thereby lowering intrusion counts compared to the baseline autopilot, but is outperformed in safety by the decentralized Modified Voltage Potential (MVP) method due to outlier scenarios. Nevertheless, the RL-based system achieves faster scenario completion and thus a higher overall throughput, by speeding up the vehicles towards the final approach fix. Future work will explore improved network architectures, transfer learning across varied scenarios, and algorithmic fine-tuning to further enhance safety performance. ... Read more

Abstract—In the coming decades, drones are expected to operate within urban areas at high volumes, and if implemented suc- cessfully, applications such as infrastructure inspection, medical supply and parcel delivery can be improved by the technology. This poses a challenge: how are these drones to be guided in this highly-constrained airspace? Many existing projects have approached the problem from different angles: some place more importance on the Tactical Layer and thus resolving conflicts in flight, while other research focuses on the Strategic Layer with scheduling or airspace design. While analysis is done on a complete system, with all separation management layers implemented, work remains to be done regarding quantifying how these layers interact, and what positive characteristics of these interactions can be utilised to make the system more efficient, safe, and robust to uncertainties. This paper proposes a framework on which this analysis can be performed. Firstly, lay- ers are investigated independently. A feedback system is proposed, where layer outputs are measured, as is the resulting system performance. For instance, an initial hypothesis is that reducing airspace complexity in the Strategic layer, while accounting for uncertainty, will lead to better overall system performance. This can help with minimising flight times and improving overall safety. Also, manoeuvres performed by the Tactical (in-flight) layer should take this complexity metric into account. The feedback loop approach also proposes that the complexity be fed back to the central planner, and that the Strategic (Pre-Flight) layer should be able to take system status into account when performing planning. ... Read more

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 (MPM) for wind field reconstruction. In this paper, we describe the METSIS concept and a proof-of-concept experiment that was performed using four drones to determine the feasibility and accuracy of the concept at low altitudes. For the experiment, ultrasonic anemometers were mounted to each drone to measure local winds. The calibration of the wind sensors was tested using the NLR Anechoic Wind Tunnel. Subsequently, flight-tests were performed at the NLR Drone Center to evaluate the effect of obstacles, drone motion, measurement density, and measurement errors on concept accuracy. Wind fields estimated during the flight-tests were published to the AirHub Drone Operations Center (DOC) system to demonstrate the communication of this data to U-space end-users in real-time. The results indicated that the METSIS concept is a promising solution for the wind nowcast component of the U-space weather information service. Further research is planned to improve the accuracy and sclability of the METSIS concept. ... Read more