An open specification for drone airspace management using H3 hexagonal grids. Multi-resolution routing from 15km inter-city express lanes to 115m precision delivery zones. Single-occupancy deconfliction. Zero collisions. One standard.
Square grids have two types of neighbors at two different distances. Hex grids have six neighbors, all equidistant. This means uniform hop costs, no path aliasing, and deterministic rerouting. When the next cell is occupied, any of 6 neighbors is exactly one hop away. No traffic jams. No collisions.
One drone per hex cell per time-slot. Deconfliction reduces to a database lookup, not continuous trajectory computation. Scales to millions of simultaneous flights.
Each resolution contains ~7 children at the next finer level. Drones descend through nested hexes from 15km express cells to 115m drop zones. The child hex is always inside the parent.
Occupied cell? Grab any of 6 equidistant neighbors. Cost: exactly one hop. Compare square grids where diagonals cost 1.41x and rerouting introduces timing uncertainty.
Every drone movement is a (droneId, hexId, timestamp) tuple. That's the complete audit trail. Jurisdiction maps to hex centroids. Licensing is hex-hours in a database.
Built on H3 (Uber, Apache 2.0). 64-bit cell IDs. Global coverage. Any operator can file flight plans against the same grid without proprietary lock-in.
The entire 6-band stack operates below 6,000m. Commercial aviation starts at FL180. Suburban delivery at 200m is below all manned aviation. Zero conflict.
The system scales from a single suburban warehouse with 2 altitude bands to dense multi-operator urban airspace with 6 bands, and extends to military swarm coordination with cryptographic grid obfuscation.
One warehouse, 2 bands (feeder + terminal), 20 drones, 15-mile radius. 500-2,000 deliveries/day. Entire operation below 300m in Class G airspace. No ATC needed.
Full 6-band stack. Multiple operators sharing the same hex mesh. Joby, Archer, EHang all file against one slot table. First-come, first-served. Automatic deconfliction.
Priority slot reservations. Blood transport, defibrillator deployment, organ delivery. 12-minute flight vs 45-minute ambulance drive. Emergency flights auto-preempt all other reservations.
"Deploy 12, sweep sector 7, feeder altitude" translates to hex set partitioning. Single-occupancy = zero mid-air collisions. No inter-drone comms needed for deconfliction.
Rolling coordinate offsets with shared PRNG seeds. Resolution hopping. Per-unit keys. Decoy grids. The mesh shifts underneath the swarm. Adversary sees ghost positions.
Define search polygon, convert to hex set, partition among swarm. Every cell visited exactly once. Progress = completedCells / totalCells. Guaranteed coverage.
No GPS waypoints. No continuous trajectories. Discrete cells with timestamps. The drone's route is a database table. Deconfliction is a SELECT query.
// A delivery flight plan — warehouse to front door { "flightId": "d7f3a1b2-...", "operator": "MEITUAN-SZ", "plan": [ { "hex": "8a2830828d07fff", "band": "drop", "t": 0 }, // pickup { "hex": "892830828d3ffff", "band": "terminal", "t": 5 }, // ascend { "hex": "882830828dfffff", "band": "feeder", "t": 12 }, // district { "hex": "872830828ffffff", "band": "trunk", "t": 20 }, // city { "hex": "872830829ffffff", "band": "trunk", "t": 35 }, // ... { "hex": "88283082bffffff", "band": "feeder", "t": 48 }, // dest district { "hex": "89283082b07ffff", "band": "terminal", "t": 55 }, // descend { "hex": "8a283082b067fff", "band": "drop", "t": 60 }, // delivery ] }
Built on H3 (Apache 2.0). The entire spec fits in 10 pages. A county in rural Iowa could adopt it tomorrow.