Abstract
Package delivery via autonomous drones is often presumed to hold commercial and societal value when applied to urban environments. However, to realise the benefits, the challenge of safely managing high traffic densities of drones in heavily constrained urban spaces needs to be addressed. This paper applies the principles of traffic segmentation and alignment to a constrained airspace in efforts to mitigate the probability of conflict. The study proposes an en-route airspace concept in which drone flights are directly guided along a one-way street network. This one-way airspace concept uses heading-altitude rules to vertically segment cruising traffic as well as transitioning flights with respect to their travel direction. However, transition flights trigger a substantial number of merging conflicts, thus negating a large part of the benefits gained from airspace structuring. In this paper, we aim to reduce the occurrence of merging conflicts and intrusions by using a delay-based and speed-based merge-assist strategy, both well-established methods from road traffic research. We apply these merge assistance strategies to the one-way airspace design and perform simulations for three traffic densities for the experiment area of Manhattan, New York. The results indicate, at most, a 9–16% decrease in total number of intrusions with the use of merge assistance. By investigating mesoscopic features of the urban street network, the data suggest that the relatively low efficacy of the merge strategies is mainly caused by insufficient space for safe manoeuvrability and the inability for the strategies to fully respond and thus resolve conflicts on short-distance streets.
Highlights
Advanced air mobility concepts, such as autonomous drones could play an essential role in future express package delivery missions, for example, medical and meal delivery in urban areas [1,2,3,4,5]
Total Number of Conflicts and Intrusions Here, we present our results for the total number of pairwise conflicts and intrusions in the one-way airspace design and its effect to the tactical conflict resolution
To improve the safety of the urban airspace design for large-scale drone traffic, this study investigates two merging policies inspired by road traffic studies [32,34,88]
Summary
Advanced air mobility concepts, such as autonomous drones could play an essential role in future express package delivery missions, for example, medical and meal delivery in urban areas [1,2,3,4,5]. The large-scale adoption of drones for urban delivery missions could potentially help reduce traffic congestion and decrease total anthropogenic CO2 emissions in cities [6,7]. As urban environments are densely populated with dynamic and static obstacles [9], operating high densities of drone-based deliveries in a confined space presents a safety hazard to urban occupants [10]. This raises the question of how to safely accommodate high-density drone traffic in a constrained urban environment. Thereafter, we discuss the one-way airspace concept for high-density drone traffic operations and its associated emergent behaviour when applied to a constrained urban environment. A conflict can be viewed as an anticipated intrusion
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