Reachability-Based Safety and Goal Satisfaction of Unmanned Aerial Platoons on Air Highways

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reachability-based framework for ensuring safety and goal achievement of UAV platoons on air highways, using hybrid system modeling and Hamilton-Jacobi reachability to provide tractable safety guarantees in large multi-agent systems.

Contribution

It proposes a structured airspace with air highways and a hybrid system model for UAV platoons, enabling real-time safety and goal satisfaction guarantees using Hamilton-Jacobi reachability analysis.

Findings

Guarantees safety for one breach per vehicle at a single altitude range.

Can extend safety guarantees over multiple altitude ranges.

Demonstrates effectiveness through simulation scenarios.

Abstract

Recently, there has been immense interest in using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for civilian operations. As a result, unmanned aerial systems traffic management is needed to ensure the safety and goal satisfaction of potentially thousands of UAVs flying simultaneously. Currently, the analysis of large multi-agent systems cannot tractably provide these guarantees if the agents' set of maneuvers is unrestricted. In this paper, platoons of UAVs flying on air highways is proposed to impose an airspace structure that allows for tractable analysis. For the air highway placement problem, the fast marching method is used to produce a sequence of air highways that minimizes the cost of flying from an origin to any destination. The placement of air highways can be updated in real-time to accommodate sudden airspace changes. Within platoons traveling on air highways, each vehicle is modeled as a hybrid system. Using Hamilton-Jacobi reachability, safety and goal satisfaction are guaranteed for all mode transitions. For a single altitude range, the proposed approach guarantees safety for one safety breach per vehicle, in the unlikely event of multiple safety breaches, safety can be guaranteed over multiple altitude ranges. We demonstrate the platooning concept through simulations of three representative scenarios.