Slot-hopping Enabled Loiter Guidance and Automation for Fixed-wing UAV Corridors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel guidance strategy for fixed-wing UAVs in corridors, enabling efficient traffic management through slot-hopping and minimal disruption, demonstrated via simulations.

Contribution

It develops a semi-cooperative loiter-lane insertion method allowing UAVs to efficiently join corridors with minimal disruption and coordinated slot hopping.

Findings

The strategy enables UAVs to insert into loiter lanes with minimal disruption.

Coordinated slot hopping creates suitable empty slots for UAV insertion.

Numerical simulations demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach.

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of traffic congestion management in fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) corridors by further developing a recently introduced loiter-lane framework. A semi-cooperative guidance strategy is developed for inserting fixed-wing UAVs into a loiter lane with minimal disruption to the UAVs already operating within it, while enabling a more compact fixed-wing UAV corridor. Building on the concepts of cooperative and non-disruptive loiter-lane insertion, the proposed strategy makes the incoming UAV first attempt, within its speed bounds, to rendezvous with an existing empty loiter slot. If direct insertion is infeasible, a minimal number of loitering UAVs perform coordinated slot hopping to create a suitably positioned empty slot. The feasibility and performance of the method are demonstrated through numerical simulations.