An RRT Based Method for Dynamic Mission Balancing for Urban Air Mobility Under Uncertain Operational Conditions

• Published in: IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference pp. 1 - 10
• Main Authors: Lou, Junlin, Yuksek, Burak, Inalhan, Gokhan, Tsourdos, Antonios
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 03.10.2021
• Subjects: Energy efficiency; Energy-efficient path; Pollution; Privacy; Quality of service; Re-planning; RRT; Transportation; Uncertain conditions; Urban air mobility; Urban areas; Visualization
• ISSN: 2155-7209
• DOI: 10.1109/DASC52595.2021.9594424

Urban air mobility provides an enabling technology towards on-demand and flexible operations for passenger and cargo transportation in metropolitan areas. Electric vertical-takeoff and landing (eVTOL) concept is a potential candidate for urban air mobility platform because of its lower carbon emissions, lower noise generations and potentially lower operational costs. However, such a transportation model is subject to numerous complicated environmental and urban design factors including buildings, dynamic obstacles and micro-weather patterns. In addition, communication, navigation and surveillance quality-of-service and availability would be affected on the overall system performance and resilience. Some social factors such as privacy, noise and visual pollution should also be considered to provide a seamless integration of the urban air mobility applications into the daily life. This paper describes an integrated RRT* based approach for designing and executing flight trajectories for urban airspace subject to operating constraints, mission constraints, and environmental conditions. The generated path is energy-efficient and enables aerial vehicle to perform mid-flight landing for battery changing or emergency situations. Moreover, this paper proposes another approach that allows on-the-fly path re-planning under dynamic constraints such as geofences or micro-weather patterns. As such, the approach also provides a method toward contingency operations such as emergency landing on the fly.