Due to the rapid development technologies for small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS), the supply and demand market for sUAS is expanding globally. With the great number of sUAS ready to fly in civilian airspace, an sUAS aircraft traffic management system that can guarantee the safe and efficient operation of sUAS is still at absence. In this paper, we propose a control protocol design and analysis method for sUAS traffic management (UTM) which can safely manage a large number of sUAS. The benefits of our approach are two folds: at the top level, the effort for monitoring sUAS traffic (authorities) and control/planning for each sUAS (operator/pilot) are both greatly reduced under our framework; and at the low level, the behavior of individual sUAS is guaranteed to follow the restrictions. Mathematical proofs and numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the proposed method.
This paper presents a novel collision avoidance strategy for unmanned aircraft detect and avoid that requires only information about the relative bearing angle between an aircraft and hazard. It is shown that this bearing-only strategy can be conceived as the solution to a novel differential game formulation of collision avoidance, and has several intuitive properties including maximising the instantaneous range acceleration in situations where the hazard is stationary or has a finite turn rate. The performance of the bearing-only strategy is illustrated in simulations based on test cases draw…
An unmanned aircraft system (UAS) consists of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and its controller which use radios to communicate. While the remote controller (RC) is traditionally operated by a person who is maintaining visual line of sight with the UAV it controls, the trend is moving towards long-range control and autonomous operation. To enable this, reliable and widely available wireless connectivity is needed because it is the only way to manually control a UAV or take control of an autonomous UAV flight. This article surveys the ongoing Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standa…
Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communications System (AeroMACS) is based on the IEEE 802.16e mobile wireless standard commonly known as WiMAX. It is expected to be the main part of the next-generation aviation communication system to support fixed and mobile services for manned and unmanned applications. AeroMACS will be an essential technology helping pave the way toward full integration of Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle (UAV) into the national airspace. A number of practical tests and analyses have been done so far for AeroMACS. The main contribution of this paper is to consider the theoretical conc…
This survey studies the potential data link candidates for unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs). There has been tremendous growth in different applications of UAVs such as lifesaving and rescue missions, commercial use, recreations, etc. Unlike the traditional wireless communications, the data links for these systems do not have any general standardized framework yet to ensure safe co-existence of UAVs with other flying vehicles. This motivated us to provide a comprehensive survey of potential data link technologies available for UAVs. Our goal is to study the current trends and available candida…
En-route congestion causes delays in air traffic networks and will become more prominent as air traffic demand will continue to increase yet airspace volume cannot grow. However, most existing studies on flight delay modeling do not consider en-route congestion explicitly. In this study, we propose a new flight delay model, Multi-layer Air Traffic Network Delay (MATND) model, to capture the impact of en-route congestion on flight delays over an air traffic network. This model is developed by a data-driven approach, taking aircraft tracking data and flight schedules as inputs to characterize a …
This paper develops and evaluates the performance of an allocation agent to be potentially integrated into the onboard Detect and Avoid (DAA) computer of an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS). We consider a UAS that can be fully controlled by the onboard DAA system and by a remote human pilot. With a communication channel prone to latency, we consider a mixed initiative interaction environment, where the control authority of the UAS is dynamically allocated by the allocation agent. In an encounter with a dynamic intruder, the probability of collision may increase in the absence of pilot commands i…
A control system verification framework is presented for unmanned aerial vehicles using theorem proving. The framework's aim is to set out a procedure for proving that the mathematically designed control system of the aircraft satisfies robustness requirements to ensure safe performance under varying environmental conditions. Extensive mathematical derivations, which have formerly been carried out manually, are checked for their correctness on a computer. To illustrate the proceedures, a higher-order logic interactive theorem-prover and an automated theorem-prover are utilized to formally veri…
Autonomous University of Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；CRIDA A.I.E
Present air traffic complexity metrics are defined considering the interests of different management layers of ATM. These layers have different objectives which in practice compete to maximize their own goals, which leads to fragmented decision making. This fragmentation together with competing KPAs requires transparent and neutral air traffic information to pave the way for an explainable set of actions. In this paper, we introduce the concept of single aircraft complexity, to determine the contribution of each aircraft to the overall complexity of air traffic. Furthermore, we describe a meth…
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast(ADSB), is the next generation Air Traffic management system to monitor the airspace for air traffic communication and traffic information. While the ADS-B empowers aircraft to broadcast their location information automatically and provide situational awareness, it is susceptible to attacks and security issues. In this paper, we introduce a method to secure the ADS-B protocol in aircraft communication using Retroactive Key Publication where senders publish their keys retroactively, which is different from the traditional asymmetric cryptography. The de…
In this paper, we propose a novel framework of air traffic management (ATM). The framework is in particular characterized by the trajectory planning of weakly supervised aircraft; the air traffic control (ATC) does not completely determine the trajectory of each aircraft unlike conventional planning methods, but determines allowable safe sets of trajectories. ATC requests pilots to select their own trajectories from the sets, and the pilots determine ones by pursuing their own aims. For example, the selection can be based on pilot preferences and airline strategies. This two stage ATM system c…
Traffic Management in Advanced Aerial Mobility (AAM) inherits many elements of conventional Air Traffic Management (ATM), but brings new complexities and challenges of its own. One of its ways of guaranteeing separation is the use of airborne, stand-alone Detect-And-Avoid, an operational concept where each aircraft decides its avoidance maneuvers independently, observing right-of-way rules and, in specific implementations, some form of pairwise coordination. This is a fundamental safety element for autonomous aircraft but, according to our research, is not sufficient for high-density airspaces…
In-flight Internet connectivity is a necessity for aircraft passengers as well as aircraft systems. It is challenging to satisfy required quality of service (QoS) levels for flows within aircraft due to the large number of users and the highly varying air to ground (A2G) link capacities composed of satellite and direct air to ground communication (DA2GC). To represent service quality variations, we propose models for the generated traffic flows from aircraft and variations in A2G links. We present three different forwarding schemes based on priority, delay requirements and history of the dropp…
Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) are safety-critical systems required on most commercial aircrafts in service today. However, TCAS was not designed to account for malicious actors. While in the past it may have been infeasible for an attacker to craft radio signals to mimic TCAS signals, attackers today have access to open-source digital signal processing software, like GNU Radio, and inexpensive software defined radios (SDR) that enable the transmission of spurious TCAS messages. In this paper, methods, both qualitative and quantitative, for analyzing TCAS from an adversarial perspe…
Decentralized Coordination of Autonomous Traffic Through Advanced Air Mobility Corridors
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics（航空航天系）；AIAA Student Member（美国航空航天学会学生会员）；Associate Dean of Engineering（工程副院长）；William E. Leonhard (1940) Professor（威廉·E·莱昂哈德（1940）教授）；AIAA Fellow（美国航空航天学会会士）
Boeing Research & Technology（波音研究与技术部）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Remain Well Clear, keeping the aircraft away from hazards by the appropriate separation distance, is an essential technology for the safe operation of uncrewed aerial vehicles in congested airspace. This work focuses on automating the horizontal separation of two aircraft and presents the obstacle avoidance problem as a 2D surrogate optimization task. By our design, the surrogate task is made more conservative to guarantee the execution of the solution in the primary domain. Using Reinforcement Learning (RL), we optimize the avoidance policy and model the dynamics, interactions, and decision-m…
