Generating Safe Corridors Roadmap for Urban Air Mobility

Abstract

Personal air transportation on short distances, so-called Urban Air Mobility (UAM), is a trend in modern aviation that raises new challenges as flying in urban areas at low altitudes induces an additional risk to people and properties on the ground. Risk-aware trajectory planning can mitigate the risk by detouring and flying over less populated and thus less risky areas. Existing risk-aware trajectory planning approaches are computationally demanding single-query methods that are impractical for online usage. Moreover, coordinated planning for multiple aircraft is prohibitively expensive. Therefore, we propose to reduce computational demands by determining low-risk areas called safe corridors and creating a roadmap of safe corridors based on multiple least risky trajectories. The created roadmap can be used in graph-based multi-agent planning methods for coordinated trajectory planning. The proposed method has been evaluated in a realistic urban scenario, suggesting a significant computational burden reduction and less risky trajectories than the current state-of-the-art methods.