2 PhD positions for Metropolis 2 project: A unified approach to airspace design and separation

Unmanned flying vehicles, or drones, are increasingly being seen as a suitable platform for a wide range of applications, from inspecting infrastructure and aerial photography, to parcel delivery, search and rescue, and many other applications. Unlike current-day manned aviation, many of these envisioned drone applications would involve operation in heavily-constrained urban airspace, and when successful, at extreme traffic densities, compared to current operations.

Currently, several large research efforts are formalizing the procedures and services that will be required for these operations (e.g., U-Space in Europe, UTM in the US). So far, these efforts have been focused on developing a set of baseline services which, when deployed, will enable low traffic density applications such as agricultural surveillance and infrastructure inspection. Urban, high-density operations, however, will require a different approach, and a degree of autonomy that does not yet exist in current-day air traffic management. As part of your PhD research, you will work in the EU-funded U-Space project Metropolis 2, which is coordinated by TU Delft. This project will develop a unified approach to airspace rules on the one hand, and flight planning and separation management approaches on the other hand, building further on the success of the seminal first Metropolis project. For this project there are two open PhD positions, one emphasising airspace design (extending the geovectoring concept), the other conflict resolution algorithm design (extending geometric methods such as MVP, using Velocity Obstacle theory). You will publish your results in leading, peer-reviewed journals. These publications will be combined in your final dissertation.