ASCENT: Transformer-Based Aircraft Trajectory Prediction in Non-Towered Terminal Airspace

Alexander Prutsch, David Schinagl, Horst Possegger
Institute of Visual Computing, Graz University of Technology
ICRA 2026
Paper Code arXiv

Abstract

Accurate trajectory prediction can improve General Aviation safety in non-towered terminal airspace, where high traffic density increases accident risk. We present ASCENT, a lightweight transformer-based model for multi-modal 3D aircraft trajectory forecasting, which integrates domain-aware 3D coordinate normalization and parameterized predictions. ASCENT employs a transformer-based motion encoder and a query-based decoder, enabling the generation of diverse maneuver hypotheses with low latency. Experiments on the TrajAir and TartanAviation datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms prior baselines, as the encoder effectively captures motion dynamics and the decoder aligns with structured aircraft traffic patterns. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the contributions of the decoder design, coordinate-frame modeling, and parameterized outputs. These results establish ASCENT as an effective approach for real-time aircraft trajectory prediction in non-towered terminal airspace.

*Page Under Construction*

Results

TrajAir Visualizations

BibTeX

@inproceedings{prutsch2026ascent,
    title={{ASCENT: Transformer-Based Aircraft Trajectory Prediction in Non-Towered Terminal Airspace}},
    author={Prutsch, Alexander and Schinagl, David and Possegger, Horst},
    booktitle={In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
    year={2026}
}