Route Planning of Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Urban Air Mobility applications

Nowadays, the vision of incorporating aviation into everyday life is progressing because of strong urbanization and the evolving need for different transportation systems in metropolitan areas. A possible solution, as most recently discussed among research groups, could be found in UAVs used as Air-taxis: these are small electric aircraft that would provide passengers a faster and more convenient means of transportation compared to ground one. According to this need, this work aims to plan routes for an Air Taxi fleet that are safe, short, low-energy, and optimally organized and distributed. In the literature, this multiple node routes service combination problem is known as UAV Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). For this purpose, several scenarios with different constraints have been evaluated. First, a simple and ideal scenario minimizing the vehicles’ routes in time and distance. Furthermore, the complexity of the scenario is increased by introducing other constraints: (i) capacity constraints of the vehicles (Capacitated VRP); (ii) pickup and deliveries location demanded by customers (VRP with Pickups and Deliveries); and, (ii) time scheduling of the rides according to customers calls for the service (VRP with Time Windows). The evaluation of these constraints influences the resulting solutions. Lastly, a more complex scenario is evaluated, minimizing the vehicles’ routes in time and distance, as well as considering the operational ground risk to third parties. This last feature is included by exploiting a risk-aware path planning algorithm capable of computing safe urban routes. Proposed scenarios are tested through simulations using meta-heuristic methods since the VRP considered is an NP-hard problem. In particular, a use case in the city of Turin is considered by simulating an Air Taxi application and adopting the proposed route planning strategy.