Developing Fundamental Diagrams for Urban Air Mobility Traffic Based on Physical Experiments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework combining theoretical analysis and physical experiments to construct fundamental diagrams for urban air mobility traffic, validated with real-world drone data and simulations.

Contribution

It is the first to derive UAM fundamental diagrams using real-world physical experiment data and provides a scalable framework for future UAM traffic modeling.

Findings

Classical FD models like Underwood are applicable to UAM.

Physical experiments reveal deviations from simulation results.

Scaled experimental data offer practical insights for UAM traffic management.

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is an emerging application of unmanned aerial vehicles that promises to reduce travel time and alleviate congestion in urban transportation systems. As drone density increases, UAM traffic is expected to experience congestion similar to that in ground traffic. However, the fundamental characteristics of UAM traffic, particularly under real-world operating conditions, remain largely unexplored. This study proposes a general framework for constructing the fundamental diagram (FD) of UAM traffic by integrating theoretical analysis with physical experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to derive UAM FDs using real-world physical experiment data. On the theoretical side, we design two drone control laws for collision avoidance and develop simulation-based traffic generation methods to produce diverse UAM traffic scenarios. Based on Edie's definition, traffic flow theory is then applied with a near-stationary traffic condition filtering method to construct the FD. To account for real-world disturbances and modeling uncertainties, we further conduct physical experiments on a reduced-scale testbed using Bitcraze Crazyflie drones. Both simulation and physical experiment trajectory data are collected and organized into the UAMTra2Flow dataset, which is analyzed using the proposed framework. Preliminary results indicate that classical FD structures for ground transportation, especially the Underwood model, are applicable to UAM systems. Notably, FD curves obtained from physical experiments exhibit deviations from simulation-based results, highlighting the importance of experimental validation. Finally, results from the reduced-scale testbed are scaled to realistic operating conditions to provide practical insights for future UAM traffic systems. The dataset and code for this paper are publicly available at https://github.com/CATS-Lab/UAM-FD.