Automated air traffic control of unmanned air vehicles

Abstract

A method and system for automated air traffic management of unmanned vehicles that assures safety and continuous flow, even for vehicles of wide-ranging capabilities. Some embodiments include onboard equipment that distributes the burden of management across all the vehicles in a given airspace so that autonomous cooperation between vehicles creates useful group-level behavior. Vehicles carry definitions of rules of interaction on shared flyways. In conjunction with a means of exchanging location and velocity information with close neighbors, onboard algorithms calculate complementary navigation vectors that inform each vehicle's autopilot of a cooperative trajectory. The collective result of individual, autonomous decisions is cooperation at a group scale that manages traffic features such as density and spacing without the need for a ground-based communication infrastructure.