Scalable Low-Cost Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicle Traffic Network

This paper proposes a new unmanned-aerial-vehicle operation paradigm to enable a large number of relatively low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles to fly beyond line of sight, without costly sensing and communication systems or substantial human intervention in individual unmanned-aerial-vehicle control, in unmanned-aerial-vehicle-only traffic that is separated from non-unmanned-aerial-vehicle airspace. The main contribution of this work is to propose the use of pre-established route network for unmanned-aerial-vehicle traffic management, which allows 1) premapping of obstacles along the route network to reduce the onboard sensing requirements and the associated costs for avoiding such obstacles and 2) use of well-developed routing algorithms to select unmanned-aerial-vehicle schedules that avoid unmanned-aerial-vehicle/unmanned-aerial-vehicle conflicts. Available Global-Positioning-System-based navigation can be used to fly the unmanned aerial vehicle along the selected route and time schedule with relatively low added cost, which therefore reduces the barrier to entry into new unmanned-aerial-vehicle applications markets. Additionally, this paper proposes a new decoupling scheme for conflict-free transitions between edges of the route network at each node of the route network to reduce potential conflicts between unmanned aerial vehicles and ensuing delays. A simulation example is used to illustrate the proposed unmanned-aerial-vehicle traffic network approach.