October 21, 2020

Mobility21 UTC researcher Rahul Mangharam and his team, which includes Kuk Jang, Yash Pant and Alena Rodionova, wrote a paper on Learning-to-Fly RL, which won the Best in Session Award at the Digital Avionics Conference.  Their work on Designing Safe Autonomous Systems includes autonomous air traffic control for future drone urban air mobility networks of 1000-5000 drones over urban areas. One key issue is that unlike commercial airlines, these drones do not fly along pre-set routes but follow what is called “free flight” and can choose their travel route. This introduces a critical problem of collisions between drones and needs to be handled via collision avoidance systems between the drones. Watch the full video here.