Achieving Equilibrium for Dense, Integrated, Vehicle Navigation

Drone usage has proliferated in recent years with many applications that have market-changing potential. Applications that include parcel delivery, wildlife protection, precision farming, law enforcement, and industrial inspection, just to name a few. In this paper, the term drone is used to mean both Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and small Unmanned Aircraft System vehicles. Flight infrastructure can currently only support a few thousand aircraft flying over the United States National Airspace System (NAS) at any given time. A delay atone airport sends ripple effects through the system, causing more delays and missed connections. Once regulations and safety policies are put in place to allow for the widespread use of unmanned drones, the number of aircraft in the NAS is expected to skyrocket to millions, potentially congesting the airspace resulting in possible separation violations. In air traffic control, separation is the concept of keeping an “ownship” aircraft outside a minimum distance from “intruder” aircraft to reduce the risk of the aircraft colliding, as well as preventing accidents due to secondary factors, such as wake turbulence. Maintaining proper separation is a safety critical property for drones in the airspace. This paper addresses separation in time and in distance for high volume corridors (en-route) and lanes(on ground). The requirements and necessary conditions for maintaining proper separation and reaching maximum throughput for a given corridor/lane are addressed assuming unidirectional corridors/lanes where an aircraft arrives from one side and departs from the opposite side. Simulation results are presented that show the presented solution guarantees a set of drones to reach the equilibrium state by adjusting their speed based on their distance to the aircraft in front of them. The equilibrium state is defined as a state when a set of n aircraft moving at a relatively constant speed and uniform spacing from each other in a congested system. A congested system is defined as a state when the aircraft cannot move at their maximum allowed speed. Unlike existing centralized and pre-planned approaches, the proposed solution is fully distributed and enables autonomous aircraft to decide to adjust their speed and distance with respect to the preceding aircraft, dynamically. Simulation results are presented that assess the feasibility of the approach using a large number of drones and evaluate the scalability of the proposed solution.