Source Oriented Safety Governance for Civil Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Urban Low Altitude Airspace

Abstract

The growth of the low-altitude economy has turned urban airspace below 1000 m into a busy, safety-critical operating environment for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Governance today is largely reactive: violations are detected and responses dispatched only once an incident is already under way. Such a model copes badly as traffic density rises and as UAV become more autonomous, harder to detect, and more varied in payload. This paper sets out a source-oriented governance framework that treats four interacting elements—operators, platforms, the airspace environment, and institutions— as a single coupled system. For the operator dimension, we examine how a de-professionalised and geographically scattered user base reshapes risk, and we build a four-layer intelligent model for assessing human-factor risk. For the platform dimension, we argue for moving protection from a bolt-on layer to a designed-in property, achieved through a security-gene embedding scheme and an integrated sense– communicate–navigate–control security chip. For the environment dimension, we describe the layered and zoned structure of urban low-altitude airspace together with a digital, rule-based constraint scheme that turns regulatory text into machine-executable rules. For the institutional dimension, we propose whole-lifecycle UAV management supported by a consortium-blockchain record system (UAV-BCLR) and a governance regime for counter-UAS equipment, linked by a mechanism that couples rules with technical enforcement. The framework shifts governance away from after-the-fact disposal and toward prevention at the logical origin of risk, and it offers theoretical and engineering guidance for an urban low-altitude safety system.