Strategic and Tactical Path Planning for Urban Air Mobility: Overview and Application to Real-World Use Cases

Abstract

Urban air mobility requires safe and efficient airspace management, as well as effective path planning and decision-making capabilities to enable access to the urban airspace, which is predicted to be very densely populated. This paper tackles the problem of strategic and tactical path planning by presenting a framework specifically designed for accounting for several constraints and issues of the urban environment. Multi-objective and multi-constraint planner algorithms are developed to this aim, along with an innovative method for information simplification and manipulation. Navigation-aware and optimized trajectories were retrieved from the strategic approach. Tactical path planning was developed using three approaches that react differently to unpredicted conditions. The entire strategic–tactical pipeline was tested in two real-world use cases, representing common missions in urban environments, such as medical delivery and short-range air taxi. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in generating the strategic path and show the different outcomes of the proposed tactical approaches, thus highlighting their advantages and drawbacks.