D-FFP: A directional force field protocol for the efficient management of aerial conflicts between UAVs

Airspace management is currently experiencing significant legislative changes in many countries due to the high complexity of the procedures involved, and the need to guarantee high levels of flight safety, particularly in urban air spaces. In this regard, both strategic and tactical conflict management solutions are being devised to handle conflicts between different UAVs. In this paper, we propose a solution for tactical conflict management that seeks to avoid collisions between UAVs while introducing low complexity in terms of calculations involved and protocol requirements. Our solution specifically addresses multirotor UAVs, and seeks to accelerate the handling of possible conflicts in aerial traffic corridors, which are the most critical scenarios envisioned for the near future due to the high density of UAVs in such spaces. Experimental results obtained in both MATLAB and our realistic drone simulator, ArduSim, evidence the advantages of our solution against previous approaches when solving collisions in a 2D plane. In addition, we propose a 3D extension to handle flight conflicts in more complex scenarios while guaranteeing that floor and ceiling flight limits are adequately enforced.