Safety-Aware Pre-Flight Trajectory Planning for Urban UAVs with Contingency Plans for Mechanical and GPS Failure Scenarios
Amin Almozel, Ania Adil, Éric Féron · Drones · 2025
Urban drone operations are exposed to unpredictable risks, including engine failure and deliberate signal interference. A recent and ongoing disruption in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has seen widespread GPS spoofing that misleads devices by hundreds of kilometers, illustrating how fragile unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations can become when over-reliant on GNSS-based navigation. Such disruptions highlight the urgent need for contingency planning in drone traffic management systems. This study introduces a safety-aware pre-flight path planning framework that proactively integrates emergency landing and GPS fallback options into UAV trajectory pre-flight planning. The planner considers proximity to predesignated emergency landing zones, communication coverage, and airspace restrictions, enabling UAVs to safely complete their operations. The approach is evaluated across realistic mission profiles such as delivery, inspection, and surveillance. Results show that the planner successfully maintains mission feasibility while embedding emergency readiness throughout each flight. This work contributes toward safer, failure-resilient drone integration in urban airspace, ensuring that contingency plans are proactively incorporated into path planning before the failure even occurs.