The wild west of drones: a review on autonomous- UAV traffic-management

This paper presents a study on autonomous UAV traffic management. As the need for autonomous UAVs grows every year, there must be a system in place for controlling the vehicles. Modern methods of air traffic control may be found ineffective to cope with the expected density of vehicles. Research of UAV is snowballing, but methods of UAV traffic management (UTM) are yet to be kickstarted. There is no backbone of how the UTM system should be built, and as of now, the solutions solve the problems of today, ignoring the ever so growing need for autonomy. In this paper, the current state-of-the-art of UTM was described, including the problem statement and exposure of autonomous UTM (a-UTM) in the scientific literature. The main findings reveal that manufacturers of the UAV's are launching autonomous vehicles only in less developed airspaces, where due to lack of infrastructure benefits outweigh the risks. Developed airspaces without regulation and infrastructure to accommodate the autonomy are restricting any testing and trials of such systems. There is a demand for a scalable a-UTM solution for BVLOS and fully-autonomous flight control in developed airspace.