Can Urban Air Mobility become reality? Opportunities, challenges and selected research results

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a new air transportation system for passengers and cargo in urban environments, enabled by new technologies and integrated into multimodal transportation systems. The vision of UAM comprises the mass use in urban and suburban environments, complementing existing transportation systems and contributing to the decarbonization of the transport sector. Initial attempts to create a market for urban air transportation in the last century failed due to lack of profitability and community acceptance. Technological advances in numerous fields over the past few decades have led to a renewed interest in urban air transportation. UAM is expected to benefit users and to also have a positive impact on the economy by creating new markets and employment opportunities for manufacturing and operation of UAM vehicles and the construction of related ground infrastructure. However, there are also concerns about noise, safety and security, privacy and environmental impacts. Therefore, the UAM system needs to be designed carefully to become safe, affordable, accessible, environmentally friendly, economically viable and thus sustainable. This paper provides an overview of selected key research topics related to UAM and how the German Aerospace Center (DLR) contributed to this research in the project "HorizonUAM - Urban Air Mobility Research at the German Aerospace Center (DLR)". Selected research results that support the realization of the UAM vision are briefly presented.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, project HorizonUA

Autonomous Drone Network: Non-Intrusive Control and Indoor Formation Positioning

The Teal Group estimated worldwide drone expenditure in 2013 to be $5.2 billion. Since then, worldwide drone expenditure has risen considerably, with the International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasting worldwide spending on drones to total$12.3 billion in 2019, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) forecast of 30.6% to 2022. As of 2019, Goldman Sachs report military applications account for 70% of the total spend with consumer applications accounting for 17%, and commercial/civil applications accounting for the remaining 13% where the latter are showing the fastest growth. Applications in construction, agriculture, offshore oil and gas, policing, journalism, border protection, mining and cinematography are predicted to see the greatest drone investment. As the demands increase, and particularly for applications that are time critical or that span large geographical areas, the single drone solution may be inadequate due to its limited energy and payload. A multiple drone solution, where the drones are networked and the drone’s position is established by GPS (global positioning system), is able to complete demanding applications more efficiently. In such systems however, the accuracy of GPS can be substantially compromised when deployed near tall buildings, trees, or bridges or if deployed indoors or underground. In this research, a drone position determination (DPD) algorithm, is proposed to overcome the shortcomings of GPS when satellite signals are compromised. An ad-hoc Wi-Fi network of autonomous quadcopter drones is constructed, as a platform to demonstrate the algorithm performance. To complement the DPD algorithm calculation, a method to estimate the distance flown, and also estimate the complete flightpath of a drone by considering the interaction of the angular velocities of a quadcopter’s four rotors (AVQR), is presented. The flight plan to examine the AVQR algorithm yields results enabling the distance flown to be calculated to an accuracy of 95%

Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends and Applications

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue entitled “Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends, and Applications” that was published in Applied Sciences. This Special Issue collected seventeen high-quality papers that discuss the main challenges of multi-robot systems, present the trends to address these issues, and report various relevant applications. Some of the topics addressed by these papers are robot swarms, mission planning, robot teaming, machine learning, immersive technologies, search and rescue, and social robotics

Unmanned aerial vehicle communications for civil applications: a review

The use of drones, formally known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has significantly increased across a variety of applications over the past few years. This is due to the rapid advancement towards the design and production of inexpensive and dependable UAVs and the growing request for the utilization of such platforms particularly in civil applications. With their intrinsic attributes such as high mobility, rapid deployment and flexible altitude, UAVs have the potential to be utilized in many wireless system applications. On the one hand, UAVs are able to operate as flying mobile terminals within wireless/cellular networks to support a variety of missions such as goods delivery, search and rescue, precision agriculture monitoring, and remote sensing. On the other hand, UAVs can be utilized as aerial base stations to increase wireless communication coverage, reliability, and the capacity of wireless systems without additional investment in wireless systems infrastructure. The aim of this article is to review the current applications of UAVs for civil and commercial purposes. The focus of this paper is on the challenges and communication requirements associated with UAV-based communication systems. This article initially classifies UAVs in terms of various parameters, some of which can impact UAVs’ communication performance. It then provides an overview of aerial networking and investigates UAVs routing protocols specifically, which are considered as one of the challenges in UAV communication. This article later investigates the use of UAV networks in a variety of civil applications and considers many challenges and communication demands of these applications. Subsequently, different types of simulation platforms are investigated from a communication and networking viewpoint. Finally, it identifies areas of future research

Urban Air Mobility: Systematic Review of Scientific Publications and Regulations for Vertiport Design and Operations

Novel electric aircraft designs coupled with intense efforts from academia, government and industry led to a paradigm shift in urban transportation by introducing UAM. While UAM promises to introduce a new mode of transport, it depends on ground infrastructure to operate safely and efficiently in a highly constrained urban environment. Due to its novelty, the research of UAM ground infrastructure is widely scattered. Therefore, this paper selects, categorizes and summarizes existing literature in a systematic fashion and strives to support the harmonization process of contributions made by industry, research and regulatory authorities. Through a document term matrix approach, we identified 49 Scopus-listed scientific publications (2016–2021) addressing the topic of UAM ground infrastructure with respect to airspace operation followed by design, location and network, throughput and capacity, ground operations, cost, safety, regulation, weather and lastly noise and security. Last listed topics from cost onwards appear to be substantially under-represented, but will be influencing current developments and challenges. This manuscript further presents regulatory considerations (Europe, U.S., international) and introduces additional noteworthy scientific publications and industry contributions. Initial uncertainties in naming UAM ground infrastructure seem to be overcome; vertiport is now being predominantly used when speaking about vertical take-off and landing UAM operations