Can a Laplace PDE Define Air Corridors through Low-Altitude Airspace?

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for defining urban low-altitude air corridors for UAS using Laplace PDEs to model ideal fluid flow, enabling efficient and safe airspace planning.

Contribution

It proposes a new spatiotemporal planning framework for UAS traffic, utilizing Laplace PDEs for corridor generation and A* search for path optimization.

Findings

Effective air corridor generation using Laplace PDEs

Enhanced airspace utilization through optimized path planning

Safe separation guarantees in dense urban environments

Abstract

This paper develops a high-density air corridor traffic flow model for Uncrewed Aircraft System (UAS) operation in urban low altitude airspace. To maximize throughput with safe separation guarantees, we define an airspace spatiotemporal planning problem. For the spatial planning, we propose a multi-floor UAS coordination structure divided into a finite number of air corridors safely wrapping buildings and obstacles. We use the USGS Lidar data to map buildings and in turn generate air corridors by modeling UAS coordination as ideal fluid flow with the streamlines obtained by solving the Laplace partial differential equation (PDE). Proper boundary conditions for the differential equations are imposed to direct air corridors along the floors desired motion direction. For temporal planning, we use 4-dimensional path-finding through the corridor network with A* search to maximize airspace usability given each UAS initial and destination waypoint pair.