Dynamic and Directionally Scaled Geocages for Containment of UAS Operations

The operation of Unmanned Aircraft (UA) in the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) specific category requires the operator to put risk-minimizing measures in place, where an operation poses a risk to third parties. A geocaging functionality contains the UA operation inside a pre-determined flight geography and defines boundaries, at which mitigative actions are triggered to ensure that the operation is returned to control or terminated safely. This paper focuses on the development of a computationally efficient geocaging algorithm with superior performance characteristics over the state-of-the-art. While the outermost boundaries of the operational volume are maintained, the presented approach leverages performance heuristics to adapt the geocage’s mitigation boundaries to the current vehicle state and direction of flight such that the operational volume is maximized and significantly faster velocities are achieved in narrow passages. Simulation results for flights in convex and concave geocage geometries, as well as benchmarks against a polygon scaling method are presented.