Self-organized free-flight arrival for urban air mobility
Research output: Contribution to journal › Research article › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Urban air mobility is an innovative mode of transportation in which electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles operate between nodes called vertiports. We outline a self-organized vertiport arrival system based on deep reinforcement learning. The airspace around the vertiport is assumed to be circular, and the vehicles can freely operate inside. Each aircraft is considered an individual agent and follows a shared policy, resulting in decentralized actions that are based on local information. We investigate the development of the reinforcement learning policy during training and illustrate how the algorithm moves from suboptimal local holding patterns to a safe and efficient final policy. The latter is validated in simulation-based scenarios, including robustness analyses against sensor noise and a changing distribution of inbound traffic. Lastly, we deploy the final policy on small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles to showcase its real-world usability.
Details
Original language | English |
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Article number | 104806 |
Journal | Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies |
Volume | 167 |
Publication status | Published - Oct 2024 |
Peer-reviewed | Yes |
External IDs
ORCID | /0000-0002-8909-4861/work/171064876 |
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Keywords
Sustainable Development Goals
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- Deep reinforcement learning, eVTOL, Urban air mobility