Comparison and integration of tactical path planning approaches for Urban Air Mobility

This paper develops several tactical path planning strategies specifically tailored for urban air mobility. The developed strategies not only account for obstacles and traffic, but also consider other relevant constraints to ensure a safe flight in urban scenarios such as risk and weather information and vehicle specifics and limitations (maximum altitude, flight path angle and endurance). In addition, the problem of ensuring reliable navigation performance is taken into account at planning level. Three tactical strategies are accounted for, which either update the time history on the trajectory or spatially modify the three-dimensional path by acting at local or global level. The three approaches are compared in the results to assess their performance as a function of the conflict geometry.