Structured-Corridor Safety-State Avoidance for Unmanned Ground Support Equipment at Aircraft Stands

Aircraft stands impose asymmetric spatial and procedural constraints that cannot be represented by geometric free space alone. This study proposes a Structured Operation Corridor for unmanned ground support equipment (SOC-UGSE), which converts existing stand markings, aircraft-side boundaries, and operating rules into machine-interpretable corridor constraints and corridor-specific actions. The framework distinguishes a detour-permitted Longitudinal Transfer Corridor (LTC-UGSE) from a no-detour Lateral Service-Approach Corridor (LSAC-UGSE), and maps object class, motion state, distance, corridor occupancy, and available clearance to Normal, Warning, or Stop responses. Standard vision, ranging, LiDAR, and temporal-processing modules are used only to instantiate these decision variables. On a controlled 1:10-scale platform, the implemented perception chain achieved an overall corridor-perception success of 83.9%, while frame-level agreement with rule-derived reference states reached 90.95%. Across 63 independent interaction sequences, sequence-level success was 95.2%, with no complete missed-stop event or prohibited boundary crossing. In a separate balanced comparison of 150 sequences, SOC-UGSE achieved the highest overall scenario-response compliance of 94.7%, outperforming distance-only stopping and corridor-free obstacle avoidance by reducing unnecessary stops and prohibited actions, respectively. These results support the structured-corridor rule-execution concept under controlled scaled-platform conditions, rather than full-scale operational safety or deployment readiness.