Automotive Innovation ›› 2025, Vol. 8 ›› Issue (1): 92-112.doi: 10.1007/s42154-024-00312-0

Previous Articles     Next Articles

Multi-flying Cars Path Planning Strategy Considering Energy Consumption and Time in Urban Environments

Tao Deng1,2,3, Jifa Yan1 & Binhao Xu1   

  1. 1. School of Aeronautics, Chongqing Jiaotong University, Chongqing, 400074, People’s Republic of China
    2. Chongqing Key Laboratory of Green Aviation Energy and Power, Chongqing, 400074, People’s Republic of China
    3. The Green Aerotechnics Research Institute of Chongqing Jiaotong University, Chongqing, 400074, People’s Republic of China
  • Online:2025-02-18 Published:2025-04-08

Abstract: A new type of transportation vehicle, the flying car, is attracting increasing attention in the automotive and aviation industries to meet people’s personalized transportation needs for urban air traffic and future travel. With its vertical take-off and landing capability, flying cars can expand its feasible routes into 3D space. The above process, however, requires sufficient path planning to obtain optimal 3D path. To solve the above issue, the inspiration was drawn from animals in the natural world to design a type of flying car that can travel in various urban environments such as land and low altitude by using different components like wheels and propellers. Incorporating the motion characteristics of flying cars in the future urban environment, segmenting the energy consumption and time models of various stages of flying cars is conducted. The introduction of temporal A* algorithm into the new field of flying cars for the first time, the priority planning algorithm for multiple flying car groups based on an improved A* algorithm utilizing safety intervals is proposed. The proposed strategy is validated on different sizes of urban environment maps. The results indicate that on a complex map with 452 nodes, the strategy effectively reduces distance by 4.5 m, decreases energy consumption by 85.8% and improves planning speed. Compared with the strategy based on multi-commodity network flow integer linear programming, the planning results are roughly the same, but the weighted cost of employing this strategy is decreased by 5.2%, and the path distance is reduced by 0.34 m.