Coordinating Cooperative Perception in Urban Air Mobility for Enhanced Environmental Awareness

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid cooperative perception approach for urban air mobility that improves environmental awareness of unmanned aircraft systems by combining local broadcast with centralized data exchange, demonstrating significant benefits in simulation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid cooperative perception method for UAM UAS, integrating local broadcast and central services to enhance environmental awareness.

Findings

Significant improvement in environmental awareness with the proposed approach

Increased communication channel load observed in simulations

Discussion on communication strategies for future UAM systems

Abstract

The trend for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is growing with prospective air taxis, parcel deliverers, and medical and industrial services. Safe and efficient UAM operation relies on timely communication and reliable data exchange. In this paper, we explore Cooperative Perception (CP) for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), considering the unique communication needs involving high dynamics and a large number of UAS. We propose a hybrid approach combining local broadcast with a central CP service, inspired by centrally managed U-space and broadcast mechanisms from automotive and aviation domains. In a simulation study, we show that our approach significantly enhances the environmental awareness for UAS compared to fully distributed approaches, with an increased communication channel load, which we also evaluate. These findings prompt a discussion on communication strategies for CP in UAM and the potential of a centralized CP service in future research.