Urban Metric Maps for Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Motion Planning

Low-altitude urban flight planning for small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) accurate vehicle kinodynamics, environment maps, and risk models to assure that plans consider the landscape as well airspace constraints. This paper presents a suite of motion metrics designed UAS defines map-based path-based holistically characterize plan quality. Proposed are examined in context representative geometric, graph-based, sampling-based planners applied multicopter UAS. A novel multi-objective heuristic is proposed graph-based sampling at four altitude layers. Monte Carlo case studies New York City illustrate metric map properties planner performance. Motion evaluated function algorithm, location, range, altitude.