SkyTrakx with ROSplane: Unmanned air-traffic management protocol simulation with fixed-wing and heterogeneous aircraft models

Abstract

SkyTrakx is a toolkit for programming and simulating Unmanned Air-Traffic Management (UTM) protocols. It allows users to design UTM protocols using operation volumes (OV) to express aircraft intent in terms of 4D blocks of airspace. It also provides a simulator to study the safety and performance of UTM protocols. However, SkyTrakx toolkit only supported simulation with quadcopters. In this paper, we extended the SkyTrakx toolkit with ROSplane, a simulated fixed-wing unmanned aircraft model, for studying UTM protocols under different flight dynamics. We implemented a controller for ROSplane to interface with SkyTrakx. We further designed various simulation environments and scenarios to analyze the example UTM protocol in SkyTrakx with ROSplane alone with both ROSplane and quadrotors; our simulation result shows that the example UTM protocol is still able to provide safe separation of heterogeneous air-vehicles if every vehicle always follows its OVs; the simulation results further show that the remaining challenge is to design a reliable controller and OVs for ROSplane.