Drones in smart cities: Overcoming barriers through air traffic control research

Abstract

Within the last decade, the recent automation of vehicles such as cars and planes promise to fundamentally alter the microeconomics of transporting people and goods. In this paper, we focus on the self-flying planes (drones), which have been renamed Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) by the US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA). The most controversial operations envisaged by the UAS industry are small, low-altitude UAS flights in densely populated cities - robotic aircraft flying in the midst of public spaces to deliver goods and information. This subset of robotic flight would be the most valuable to the nation's economy, but we argue that it cannot happen without a new generation of air traffic control and management services. This paper presents a cloud based system for city-wide unmanned air traffic management, prototype sensor systems required by city police to keep the city safe, and an analysis of control systems for collision avoidance.