Mc Carthy, Timothy and Pforte, Lars and Burke, Rebekah
(2020)
Fundamental Elements of an Urban UTM.
Aerospace, 7 (85).
pp. 1-28.
ISSN 2226-4310
Abstract
Urban airspace environments present exciting new opportunities for delivering drone
services to an increasingly large global market, including: information gathering; package delivery;
air-taxi services. A key challenge is how to model airspace environments over densely populated
urban spaces, coupled with the design and development of scalable traffic management systems
that may need to handle potentially hundreds to thousands of drone movements per hour. This
paper explores the background to Urban unmanned traffic management (UTM), examining highlevel
initiatives, such as the USA’s Unmanned Air Traffic (UTM) systems and Europe’s U-Space
services, as well as a number of contemporary research activities in this area. The main body of the
paper describes the initial research outputs of the U-Flyte R&D group, based at Maynooth
University in Ireland, who have focused on developing an integrated approach to airspace
modelling and traffic management platforms for operating large drone fleets over urban
environments. This work proposes pragmatic and innovative approaches to expedite the roll-out of
these much-needed urban UTM solutions. These approaches include the certification of drones for
urban operation, the adoption of a collaborative and democratic approach to designing urban
airspace, the development of a scalable traffic management and the replacement of direct human
involvement in operating drones and coordinating drone traffic with machines. The key
fundamental elements of airspace architecture and traffic management for busy drone operations
in urban environments are described together with initial UTM performance results from simulation
studies.
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Additional Information: |
This publication has emanated from research supported by a Strategic Partnership Programme Grant
from Science Foundation Ireland, in association with Airbus and Irelandia Aviation, under Grant number
17/SPP/3460. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access
article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution
(CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: |
unmanned aircraft system; drones; U-space services; UTM; risk modelling; traffic management; simulation; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering > Computer Science |
| Item ID: |
13145 |
| Identification Number: |
https://doi.org/10.3390/7070085 |
| Depositing User: |
Tim McCarthy
|
| Date Deposited: |
31 Jul 2020 15:06 |
| Journal or Publication Title: |
Aerospace |
| Publisher: |
MDPI |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Funders: |
Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), Airbus, Irelandia Aviation |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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