Distributed Bidding-Based Detect-and-Avoid for Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in National Airspace

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have great potential in civilian applications, such as package delivery, agriculture, and disaster management. The number of UAVs in these applications will continue to increase, and thus so does the importance of safely integrating them into the National Airspace System (NAS), with one key component being the management of UAV traffic. Agents may be given pre-planned paths from a mediator traffic management system, but a system must also be implemented to resolve conflicts arising from issues such as deviation from preplanned paths or uncooperative agents. Deviations can occur from any number of factors, and a proper traffic management framework must be capable of resolving these conflicts. Proposed here is a Detect-and-Avoid (DAA) system that will resolve conflicts between UAVs in the airspace in a distributed bidding based method. The results show this approach can be scaled to a system with a large number of UAVs, and will provide near-optimal solutions in a dynamic environment.