AAM and UAS Collision Avoidance in the Presence of Wind and Wake Turbulence

One of the key challenges that the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) sector faces is airspace segregation, which represents a conservative approach to minimize the risk of mid-air collisions between unmanned and manned aircraft. UAS must have the capabilities to identify, detect and resolve any possible conflicts or collision threats. Sense-and-avoid (SAA) algorithms are responsible for separation assurance and collision avoidance. SAA systems are becoming a requirement for UAS operations. In this paper, we extend the concept of collision avoidance to not only include avoiding a possible impact but also evading possible encounters of wake turbulence from intruder aircraft. This novel approach can greatly increase the capability of SAA by minimizing not only the risk of collision but also the loss of control due to any wake vortices. Moreover, a model for calculating the safe separation distance between different combinations of aircraft based on wake vortices intensity and decay is presented. Real-life effects such as wind turbulence are analyzed to study the effect on the effectiveness of the SAA system. In this paper, we focus on generating avoidance volumes that encapsulate both the hazardous wake and the uncertainty arising from the stochastic nature of wind turbulence. This is simulated as an encounter between two Manned/Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, which resembles a typical interaction scenario in the AAM field.