3-D Hybrid Trajectory Modeling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVS)

The burgeoning use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) evidences forthcoming environments where innumerable UAVs will appear in the National Airspace System (NAS). The UAS traffic man- agement (UTM) aims to provide solutions to enable safe integration of numerous UAVs into the NAS, but the design of effective UTM strategies faces significant challenges. One of the challenges is to develop high-fidelity trajectory models for UAVs of partially known or unknown dynamics. Tradi- tional physics-based models that require costly system identifications and field tests, and data-based models that require large amount of real flight data may not be feasible. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a hybrid 3-dimensional (3-D) UAV trajectory modeling framework, which in- tegrates the physics-based and data-based models to capture the dynamics of UAVs of interest with high accuracy using only a small amount of real flight data. Simulation studies and field tests validate and demonstrate the good performance of the proposed framework.