Aircraft Path Planning for UAM Applications

Aircraft path planning in urban air mobility context relates to finding of a continuous path/trajectory that will drive the aircraft from a start to an end location knowing the environment map. This map can be a 3D model, including semantic information (no fly zones, aerial corridors) that are constraints for the path planning algorithm. This paper investigates the aircraft path plan dealing with the flight pre-known obstacles in the 3D space, regardless of their static or dynamic characteristics, that syncs with the local path in cases when pre-flight unknown obstacles are detected along the global path by one of the aircraft’s sensors to ensure safe flight between flight origin and destination locations. To achieve this, we rely on a combination of A* and Visibility graphs approach