Research Advances in UAS and Advanced Air Mobility: Detect and Avoid and Path Planning for High Density Airspace

In the recent past, important efforts have been devoted to the safe integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in all classes of airspace, a key-prerequisite to unleash their full potential for civilian operations. Closely linked with these developments, advanced air mobility (AAM) has appeared as a new and disruptive dimension for aviation, potentially enabling mobility of goods and people at a different scale compared with current operations. This exciting evolution is reshaping the future of aviation, but it also challenges traditional paradigms in the field of avionics, and requires advances both from a technological and a regulatory perspective.
This lecture addresses gaps and recent research advances in this framework, focusing within a unified perspective on detect and avoid (DAA) and path planning / airspace management. DAA has represented one of the main roadblocks to the integration of UAS operations. The lecture will first outline architectures, technologies, and algorithms for DAA. Then, it will discuss recent trends and progress in DAA and more in general in low altitude airspace surveillance. Concerning path planning, the focus will be set on highly autonomous low-altitude flight operations in dense urban environments, which emphasize the links between airspace structure and management, and the requirements on communications navigation and surveillance (CNS) technologies. The lecture will address recent multi-objective navigation-aware strategic and tactical planning approaches which can be used as workhorses for traffic deconfliction at infrastructure and vehicle level.

Sponsors: IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS) and IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS)