Strategic path planning for high density operations in unstructured and partially structured urban airspace

This work uses a multi-objective path planner as backbone to solve trajectory planning for a set of UAVs requesting access to the urban airspace. The planner accounts for path length, ground risk, contingency landing sites and energy consumption for defining the optimal UAV trajectories. A modular planning framework has been conceived which adapts to different airspace structures. Specifically, this paper deals with completely unstructured and partially structured (with geovectoring constraints) airspace. Performance of the planner in these two cases is assessed in a simulated scenario taken from real world environments, as a function of the number of UAVs, the selected optimization rules, and the size of the scenario. Results suggest using geovectoring approach is beneficial in terms of conflict resolution, until the geovectoring zone capability saturates.