Urban Air Mobility

Dear Colleagues,

In the short term, airspace in the metropolitan environment will be shared by traditional manned vehicles and (mainly electric) unmanned vehicles, flying at low or very low levels, covering a wide range of services, and contributing at the same time to reducing the carbon footprint left by our daily activity. In this sense, the concepts of urban air mobility (UAM) and unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) are currently being developed by public and private organizations both in Europe and America. Apart from other important aspects, such as regulation and safety, many technical challenges must be addressed for this scenario.

This Special Issue focuses on all the technical issues related to UAM, including the design and evaluation of new vehicles, safe navigation, and traffic integration. We invite the scientific community to provide high-quality contributions with consolidated and evaluated research related to this promising investigation area.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• UAM concept of operations (SESAR U-space and NextGEN UTM architectures);
• Unmanned aircraft system (UAS) traffic management (UTM);
• Low-altitude airspace monitoring;
• Collision-free air navigation (path planning, following, and tracking; obstacle avoidance; conflict detection and resolution);
• Manned/unmanned aircraft coexistence in integrated airspaces;
• Cooperative/swarm navigation;
• Autonomous (non-remotely piloted) navigation;
• eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) vehicles;
• Air-to-air and air-to-ground communications;
• UAM services (people and goods transportation, wireless communications support, surveillance, inspection of critical infrastructures, precision agriculture, health, emergency management, etc.);
• UAM modeling, simulation, and evaluation;
• Other issues (environmental, social, economic, regulatory, etc.)

Prof. Dr. Rafael Casado
Prof. Dr. Aurelio Bermúdez
Guest Editors

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