Using the Artificial Potential Field Method for UAM Trajectory Planning in Urban Environments With Varying Wind Conditions
Joshua T. Nguyen, Srikanth Gururajan · 2025
The growth of Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) and Urban Air Mobility/Advanced Air Mobility (UAM/AMM) technology in recent years has moved these industries closer to the goal of providing services in urban areas. However, this comes with many challenges, such as the autonomous avoidance of obstacles such as buildings in most, if not all, weather conditions, particularly in windy conditions. This paper presents a novel method for trajectory planning for UAS in windy urban environments based on the Artificial Potential Field (APF) method, which is designed to be robust without requiring large amounts of computational resources. This method uses two distinct planning regimes: the first where the algorithm considers only attractive potential and the second where the algorithm randomly generates trajectories and optimizes them for obstacle avoidance by considering controls cost and repulsive potential. This algorithm is then applied to two different simulated environments, modeled on semi-realistic environments for various test cases. The results of these simulations demonstrate the future potential of this path planning method.