An Adaptive Airspace Model for Quadcopters in Urban Air Mobility

Abstract

The emerging usage of quadcopters in Urban Air Mobility has urged airspace design to be precise and dynamic to mitigate collision risks. This paper proposes an adaptive AirMatrix model to obtain the block size of AirMatrix that is calculated through the acceptable track deviation of quadcopters by considering GPS signal quality and wind field. First, the acceptable GPS-induced deviation is calculated to meet the safety tolerance by analyzing the distributions of GPS-induced deviation under different signal quality levels. Second, a dynamic modeling and simulation method is applied to assess the wind impact on the track deviation accurately. The wind-induced deviation is calculated using a wind effect model considering surface friction and turbulence. Results show that the proposed model can reduce airspace conserveness by providing 45 percent available blocks more than the previous model. By considering the wind impact, the adaptive AirMatrix improves the safety performance of blocks at levels ranging from 4.9% to 95.5%, compared with the model without considering wind impact. The adaptive AirMatrix model provides a delicate and targeted approach to design airspace for quadcopters, which benefits traffic management in Urban Air Mobility.