Redefining metropolitan skies: fluid dynamics-driven air corridors for urban air mobility

Abstract

To address the challenges of low-altitude airspace utilization and safety in urban air mobility, this study proposes a fluid dynamics-driven framework for generating adaptive air corridors. The primary goal is to enable high-density, collision-free flight operations in complex urban environments. First, a high-density air corridor structure model for urban air mobility (UAM) is established. The urban airspace is divided into layers based on vertical height and flight direction, seamlessly integrating three-dimensional (3D) space with urban traffic. Second, easily accessible elevation data are used to map buildings, and the velocity field is obtained by iteratively solving the discretized Navier–Stokes and Poisson equations using the finite difference method. The initialized velocity field provides a starting point for the numerical simulation. The fluid dynamics simulation of the air corridor is completed by modeling the flow of an incompressible ideal fluid. Third, a rotation matrix was employed to modify the velocity field, guiding the air corridors along the desired direction of movement at each layer, and streamlines are computed using numerical integration methods. Results show that the proposed algorithm has been experimentally applied to several metropolitan areas, validating the effectiveness of the generated air corridors. Additionally, comparative experiments were conducted to analyze the influence of relevant parameters on corridor generation. The code is available at https://github.com/xuqin-opensource/AirCorridor.git.