Urban Air Mobility Trajectory Planning

Abstract

The world’s population in urban areas has been increasing rapidly during the last few decades and is expected to continue to grow over the near future. With this major population increase, traffic congestion is expected to worsen significantly in urban areas, and creative solutions will be required for addressing this problem, which has a considerable environmental, economic, and societal impact on the urban population. Urban air mobility could be such an innovative solution. This work introduces urban air mobility trajectory planning, where classical receding horizon optimizations are extended to satisfy on-demand planning of safe trajectories for the aerial vehicles in large and dense environments. Specifically, for reducing the overall problem complexity, a new parameter, i.e., the safety horizon, is introduced and, to model accurately aerial vehicle location uncertainty, a mixed integer quadratic optimization problem is proposed. Extensive simulations are performed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework for on-demand mobility planning in urban environments.