Airports

Cost Economics of Aircraft Size

Wei, Wenbin
Hansen, Mark
1993

The authors study the relationship between aircraft cost and size for large commercial passenger jets. Based on a translog model, they develop an econometric cost function for aircraft operating cost and find that economies of aircraft size and stage length exist at the sample mean of their data set, and that for any given stage length there is an optimal size, which increases with stage length. The scale properties of the cost function are changed considerably if pilot unit cost is treated as endogenous, since it is correlated with size. The cost-minimising aircraft size is therefore...

A Power Consumption Model for Multi-Rotor Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Liu, Zhilong
Sengupta, Raja
Kurzhanskiy, Alex
2017

We develop a theoretical power consumption model for multi-rotor Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), estimate the model parameters, and validate it by flying an IRIS+ quadrotor UAS and measuring its energy consumption experimentally. The model is derived from the helicopter literature. Such models are required to create UAS flight planning systems.

A Resource Allocation Algorithm for Multivehicle Systems With Nonholonomic Constraints

Rathinam, Sivakumar
Sengupta, Raja
Darbha, Swaroop
2007

This paper is about the allocation of tours of m targets to n vehicles. The motion of the vehicles satisfies a nonholonomic constraint (i.e., the yaw rate of the vehicle is bounded). Each target is to be visited by one and only one vehicle. Given a set of targets and the yaw rate constraints on the vehicles, the problem addressed in this paper is 1) to assign each vehicle a sequence of targets to visit, and 2) to find a feasible path for each vehicle that passes through the assigned targets with a requirement that the vehicle returns to its initial position. The heading angle at each...

A Safe Flight Algorithm for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Rathinam, S.
Sengupta, R.
2004

Military applications require unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) to travel in an unknown, hostile environment. Hence minimizing the damage of these UAVs is crucial to any mission. The objective of this paper is to develop control algorithms that help in keeping the UAV 'safe'. Safety implies that the UAVs are not damaged or destroyed during the mission. We present two algorithms that guide the forward motion of these UAVs and illustrate how this safe flight algorithm can be coupled with other path planning algorithms.

An Energy-Based Flight Planning System for Unmanned Traffic Management

Liu, Zhilong
Sengupta, Raja
2017

In this paper, we proposed an energy-based flight planning system for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM). Fuel consumption estimation at the flight planning stage is safety critical in general aviation, because energy-related failures are often life-threatening. However, conservative fuel estimation is not economical and environmentally friendly because carrying unnecessary fuel load burns a lot of extra fuel. The same reasoning holds in UTM. Aviation researchers are actively working on optimizing fuel loading, but such research is lacking in UTM. In this paper, we...

An Energy-Based Optimal Control Problem for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Planning

Liu, Zhilong
Kurzhanskiy, Alex
Sengupta, Raja
2017

In this paper, we formulate the flight planning problem for a multirotor Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) as an optimal control problem. The cost optimized is the energy consumption at the cruise phase of a mission. We first present a general formulation, then address a special cases: optimizing flight directions given vehicle speed. The problem was solved numerically on digital elevation models (DEM) with the Ordered Upwind Method (OUM). By combining the optimized path with timestamps, we can generate 4D trajectories typically used in aviation flight planning, and thus maximize the...

Cooperative and Non-Cooperative UAS Traffic Volumes

Bulusu, Vishwanath
Sengupta, Raja
Polishchuk, Valentin
Sedov, Leonid
2017

We describe an analytical process to determine how much UAS traffic is feasible. The process is a simulator and data processing tools. The two are applied to the US San Francisco Bay Area and Norrkoping, Sweden. The amount of UAS traffic is measured in flights per day and simulated up to 200,000 flights. A UAS traffic volume is feasible if specified metrics meet operational requirements with high probability and are stable, in the sense of being below thresholds observed for monotone properties in random geometric graphs. We focus on conflict cluster size and argue for it as a fundamental...

Obstacle avoidance with sensor uncertainty for small unmanned aircraft

Frew, E.
Sengupta, R.
2004

The ability to detect, sense, and avoid obstacles in the environment is a critical capability for autonomous groups of unmanned aircraft. The overall obstacle avoidance problem is typically studied as two or three separate subproblems. Unfortunately, such an approach can lead to unrealistic assumptions being made about the other subsystems or specification of unnecessarily high levels of subsystem performance. In this paper, we present an approach to obstacle avoidance in the context of a multilayered, multi-objective control architecture that considers both the aircraft dynamics and...

Obstacle Detection for Small Autonomous Aircraft Using Sky Segmentation

McGee, T.G.
Sengupta, R.
Hedrick, K.
2007

A vision-based obstacle detection system for small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is presented. Obstacles are detected by segmenting the image into sky and non-sky regions and treating the non-sky regions as obstacles. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated by using the vision output to steer a small unmanned aircraft to fly towards an obstacle. The experiment was first verified in a hardware in the loop (HIL) simulation and then successfully implemented on a small modified remote control plane using a large inflatable balloon as the obstacle.

SimUAM: A Toolchain to Integrate Ground and Air to Evaluate Urban Air Mobility's Impact on Travel Behavior

Yedavalli, Pavan S.
Onat, Emin Burak
Peng, Xin
Sengupta, Raja
Waddell, Paul
Bulusu, Vishwanath
Vishwanath, Min
2022

Over the past several years, Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has galvanized enthusiasm from investors and researchers, marrying expertise in aircraft design, transportation, logistics, artificial intelligence, battery chemistry, and broader policymaking. However, two significant questions remain unexplored: (1) What is the value of UAM in a region’s transportation network? and (2) How can UAM be effectively deployed to realize and maximize this value to all stakeholders, including riders and local economies? To adequately understand the value proposition of UAM for metropolitan areas, the authors...