One challenge that the space, aeronautical and automotive industries are facing today is the fast growing number of vehicles versus the slowly growing number of useful orbits, routes, and speedways. Furthermore, the adoption of “free-flight”, “speed-drive”, etc. policies in the near future will only aggravate it. All these factors increase the risk of collisions and the frequency of deviation maneuvers to avoid them. But they also create the opportunity to devise policies to mitigate such problems, including algorithms to propagate the uncertainties in vehicle motions and to predict the risk of their collisions.
This work discusses the development and simulation of an algorithm for the propagation of navigation uncertainties in the trajectory of aerospace vehicles, to minimize the risk of collisions.
The scenario of Satellites Formation Flying shall be used for the simulations, with focus on the prediction of the collision probability. The following restrictions apply: the system shall work in real time (deterministic time for the employed algorithm); the scenarios shall be cooperative; and the minimization of the collision risk shall be envisaged.
The discussion can be extended to aeronautical/automotive scenarios, pinpointing the situation of an incommunicable aircraft/car, being the control tower/traffic central the authority responsible for rerouting the other airplanes/cars, under the same restrictions.