A Simulation Study of Urban Air Mobility Concept in Layered Airspace Environment

This paper focuses primarily on urban air mobility (UAM), including air transportation for passengers and goods in metropolitan areas. Simulations of UAM in urban environment are conducted. Firstly, quadrotor configuration is determined as the research object of this paper. Based on the flight dynamic equations, the 6-DOF mathematical model of quad-rotor UAS is established. A flight control law based on nonlinear dynamic inversion method is designed for the quadrotor to follow the expected path. Then, the airspace below 120 m is divided into several layers. UAM aircrafts with a similar flight heading fly in a same layer and the vertical separation of high risk UAM aircrafts can be maintained. The flight profile of UAM aircraft is designed based on the layered airspace, including the flight attitude and heading in the flight phases. Finally, to verify the concept proposed in this paper, several mathematic simulations are conducted based on the urban airspace environment described above. The simulations include complete flight processes of multi-UAM in layered airspace. The simulation data is collected and results are analyzed. It is concluded that with proper management of airspace and flight control algorithm, this work is able to simulate the UAM operation in urban environment. The proposed airspace management method could be effective to guarantee the flight safety of UAM. At last of this paper, the research conclusion and expected future work are discussed.