Will Bonnell

Email: William.Bonnell@brl.ac.uk

Supervisors: Eddie Wilson and Jonathan Lawry

PhD Project Title: Comparing Traffic Management Strategies for Commercial use UAVs

Research Group: Thales T-B Phase

Biography

How do you ensure that thousands of UAVs flying around a city don't all collide? Could amazon delivery drones be routed more smartly in order to improve overall airspace throughput? Is there a safe and efficient way to introduce greater levels of structure in an airspace to improve performance given changing environmental parameters? These are the sorts of questions I will attempt to be answering with my time as a FARSCOPE student. I aim to explore these questions through the development of a general UAV simulator, designing a variety of agent rules and exploring various methods for routing UAVs.

Before joining the 2017 cohort on the FARSCOPE program I completed a 4 year integrated masters (MPhys) at the university of Bath. This was a fairly general course with units in a variety of fields including photonics, condensed matter and quantum mechanics. However, I chose a number of units that gave me a good grounding in computational physics and completed a masters project on analysing the way Flower-Polinator networks collapse via simulations.

When I'm not sat in front of a PC coding up new UAV routing strategies or tweaking my simulator frame work I can usually be found sat at a table with a board/card/war-game in front of me.