Sphereabout: A Spherical Intersection Design for Networked Urban Air Mobility

TL;DR

This paper proposes Sphereabout, a novel spherical intersection design for urban UAV traffic management, enabling conflict-free 3D air mobility through a geometrically optimized spherical roundabout.

Contribution

It introduces a new 3D aerial network architecture inspired by terrestrial traffic systems, utilizing spherical intersections for efficient UAV traffic flow management.

Findings

Conflict-free UAV traffic management demonstrated

Numerical experiments validate the spherical intersection model

Optimized traffic flow through geometrical design

Abstract

Urban aerial mobility is rapidly expanding, specifically on-demand Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) delivery services in urban environments. This necessitates management of the low-altitude airspace network to ensure smooth and safe traffic throughput. This study introduces a novel three-dimensional aerial network design inspired by a terrestrial transportation graph network for UAV networked mobility. Utilizing two-way tube corridors for node-to-node delivery and a spherical roundabout model, as "Sphereabout", to optimize the traffic flow through the spherical intersection. Through this architecture, three-dimensional conflict-free air mobility management can be achieved via numerical experiments and utilizing the geometrical features of this intersection.