Drone Traffic Management With Dynamic Flight Path Rerouting
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Solution Overview
Problem
The management of drone traffic is a significant challenge, particularly as the number of drones increases, leading to potential accidents with structures, people, animals, and other drones, which is a concern for regulatory bodies like the FAA without appropriate traffic management systems in place.
Innovation Solution
A drone traffic management system that includes a computer for calculating and re-calculating flight paths based on traffic management factors such as weather, barriers, and other drones, ensuring collision avoidance and compliance with regulatory parameters, with the capability to manage multiple drones through sector drones and master drones for enhanced control.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If the number of drones is increased to improve delivery capacity, then productivity increases, but the risk of collisions with structures, people, animals, and other drones increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a central traffic management system that acts as an intermediary between multiple drones and the airspace environment. This system calculates and assigns collision-free flight paths for multiple drones, coordinates their movements, and manages interactions with ground structures and other obstacles, thereby enabling increased drone density without proportionally increasing collision risk
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary calculation of flight paths before drones depart, taking into account weather conditions, natural barriers, manmade barriers, and other traffic management factors. By pre-planning routes and assigning them to specific drones before flight begins, the system prevents collisions rather than reacting to them in real-time
2Ease of operation
If automated flight control is implemented to reduce manual intervention, then ease of operation improves, but the complexity of traffic management increases
Solution Approach 1:
The traffic management system is designed as a universal platform that handles multiple functions: path calculation, collision avoidance, weather monitoring, barrier detection, and inter-drone coordination. By consolidating these diverse functions into a single multi-functional system, the patent manages complexity through integration rather than proliferation of separate systems
Solution Approach 2:
The system continuously receives feedback from drones about their location, status, and environmental conditions, and uses this feedback to dynamically recalculate and adjust flight paths. This closed-loop control enables automated adaptation to changing conditions while maintaining systematic coordination of multiple drones
Data Source
AI summary
A drone traffic management system comprising a computer comprising memory means for storing origin coordinates indicating an origin location of a drone, destination coordinates indicating a destination of the drone, and traffic management factors located between the origin location of the drone and the destination of the drone; and processing means for controlling the flight of a drone. This is accomplished by calculating a flight path for the drone to fly automatically from the origin location to the destination location without manual intervention, sending the flight path to the drone, receiving location data of the drone as it travels from the origin location to the destination, re-calculating the flight path of the drone as a function of the traffic management factors and the location data of the drone, and sending the re-calculated flight path to the drone.