Ground Assisted Conflict Resolution in Self-Separation Airspace Georgios Chaloulos * Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, CH-8092, Switzerland Giannis P. Roussos † National Technical University of Athens, Zografou, Athens 15700, Greece John Lygeros ‡ Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, CH-8092, Switzerland Kostas J. Kyriakopoulos § National Technical University of Athens, Zografou, Athens 15700, Greece We propose a novel method for conflict resolution for aircraft flying in a self-separation airspace, with the possibility of some ground assistance. Our method is based on navigation functions, that can guarantee decentralized conflict avoidance for the short term horizon, supported by a model predictive controller on the ground, responsible for the optimization of the aircraft flight plans in the mid term horizon. As a consequence, our method combines the short term safety guarantees provided by navigation functions with the long term optimality and constraint satisfaction guarantees (in terms of airspeed, turning radius etc.) provided by model predictive controllers. The efficiency of the approach is demonstrated on simulations involving a number of aircraft converging in planar configurations. Nomenclature L Cost Function T Sampling time N Prediction Horizon Θ Control inputs O Navigation Function (as viewed by Model Predictive Controller) Φ Navigation Function q i Position of aircraft i in planar Cartesian coordinates θ i Heading angle of aircraft i u i Longitudinal velocity of aircraft i ω i Angular (Yaw) Velocity of aircraft i r i Radius of the protected space of i-th aircraft * Doctorate Student, Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Automatic Control Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Physikstrasse 3, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland; chaloulos@control.ee.ethz.ch, AIAA Student Member † PhD Student, Mechanical Engineering Department, Control Systems Lab, National Technical University of Athens, 9 Heroon Polytechniou Str., Zografou, Athens 15700, Greece; jrous@mail.ntua.gr ‡ Professor, Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Automatic Control Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Physikstrasse 3, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland; lygeros@control.ee.ethz.ch § Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department, Control Systems Lab, National Technical University of Athens, 9 Heroon Polytechniou Str., Zografou, Athens 15700, Greece; kkyria@mail.ntua.gr 1 of 12 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics