Safe and Scalable Real-Time Trajectory Planning Framework for Urban Air Mobility

This paper presents a real-time trajectory planning framework for urban air mobility (UAM) that is both safe and scalable. The proposed framework employs a decentralized, free-flight concept of operation in which each aircraft independently performs separation assurance and conflict resolution, generating safe trajectories by accounting for the future states of nearby aircraft. The framework consists of two main components: a data-driven reachability analysis tool and an efficient Markov-decision-process-based decision maker. The reachability analysis overapproximates the reachable set of each aircraft through a discrepancy function learned online from simulated trajectories. The decision maker, on the other hand, uses a 6-degree-of-freedom guidance model of fixed-wing aircraft to ensure collision-free trajectory planning. Additionally, the proposed framework incorporates reward shaping and action shielding techniques to enhance safety performance. The proposed framework was evaluated through simulation experiments involving up to 32 aircraft in a generic city-scale area with a 15 km radius, with performance measured by the number of near-midair collisions (NMAC) and computational time. The results demonstrate the planner’s ability to generate safe trajectories for the aircraft in polynomial time, showing its scalability. Moreover, the action shielding and reward shaping strategies show up to a 78.71 and 85.14% reduction in NMAC compared to the baseline planner, respectively.