Safety Separation Assessment for Quadrotor UAVs Considering Rotor-Downwash-Induced Aerodynamic Interference

Abstract

With the increasing scale and density of low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations, safety separation between multirotor UAVs has become a critical parameter for low-altitude airspace management. Existing studies mainly consider aircraft geometry, navigation errors, trajectory deviations, and conventional collision risk models, while rotor-downwash-induced aerodynamic interference remains insufficiently addressed. This study proposes a safety separation assessment method for quadrotor UAVs by integrating computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with an improved Event collision model. A small-scale quadrotor UAV is analyzed, and its rotor downwash flow fields under vertical- and horizontal-motion conditions are simulated using the multiple reference frame method. Based on a 5 m/s crosswind-resistance capability threshold, aerodynamic-interference characteristic distances are extracted and used to construct a basic collision box. To better represent the actual aerodynamic hazard region, an I-shaped improved collision box is further developed and incorporated into the Event collision model. Under a target level of safety, the longitudinal, lateral, and vertical minimum safety separations are determined as 1.68 m, 1.72 m, and 1.08 m, respectively. The results show that the proposed CFD–Event coupled method can transform rotor downwash characteristics into collision risk parameters and provide a quantitative basis for safety separation assessment in dense low-altitude multirotor UAV operations.