A Consensus-Based Merging and Spacing Method for Autonomous Aircraft Operation

This paper analyzes the merging and spacing consensus problem for autonomous aircraft operations with respect to separation related tasks delegated from air traffic controller to flight deck. A consensus-based control protocol is developed to achieve an ordered and safe traffic flow at a given interaction waypoint. Two primary implementation steps are covered in the protocol. In the first step, consensus on the target merging flow is achieved, where the merging stream is modeled as a straight line with minimum total converging distance. In the second step, multiple aircraft with double-integrator dynamics and time-varying communication topologies are guided to merge into the target flow while maintaining appropriate inter-aircraft spacing. A state control law is designed and the Lyapunov analysis method is leveraged to derive sufficient conditions on the communication topology and operation condition for merging agents to reach consensus in finite time. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated with experimental simulations under different hypothetical scenarios in the two-dimensional plane