Aerial Vehicles

This book contains 35 chapters written by experts in developing techniques for making aerial vehicles more intelligent, more reliable, more flexible in use, and safer in operation.It will also serve as an inspiration for further improvement of the design and application of aeral vehicles. The advanced techniques and research described here may also be applicable to other high-tech areas such as robotics, avionics, vetronics, and space

Offshore Drone Logistics Optimization and Corporate Feasibility

Drones can help offshore logistics to improve safety, increase production efficiency, and reduce CO2 emissions. Drones will also be used in the development of new energy solutions on offshore stations. The aim is to see new logistics and support infrastructure, which will complement what we now have on ships and helicopters. Johan Castberg FPSO requires offshore drone logistics operations and for that purpose literature review on the history and types of drones is done to establish a multi-criteria system. Based on that multi-criteria system a drone fleet with different ranges and payload capacities is established. Keeping an eye on the advanced and upcoming drone technologies that can boost the use of drones in offshore logistics different power sources are discussed. To fulfill the objectives of offshore drone logistics in a pre-operational and operational phase different challenges have been discussed in this thesis project that includes type of logistics model in the supply chain, loading and unloading mechanisms with human safety and Environmental parameters, Operational and maintenance regime, and feasibility analysis of the implementation of drone logistics. All these pre-operational and operational phase challenges are discussed in detail and solutions to different challenges are proposed

System-Level Analysis of Autonomous UAV Landing Sensitivities in GPS-Denied Environments

This paper presents an analysis of the navigation accuracy of an fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) landing on a aircraft carrier. The UAV is equipped with typical sensors used in landing scenarios. Data from the Office of Naval Research is used to accurately capture the behavior of the aircraft carrier. Through simulation, the position and orientation of both the UAV and carrier are estimated. The quality of the UAV’s sensors are varied to determine the sensitivity of these estimates to sensor accuracy. The system’s sensitivity to GPS signals and visual markers on the carrier is also analyzed. These results allow designers to choose the most economical sensors for landing systems that provide a safe and accurate landing

Robust post-stall perching with a simple fixed-wing glider using LQR-Trees

Birds routinely execute post-stall maneuvers with a speed and precision far beyond the capabilities of our best aircraft control systems. One remarkable example is a bird exploiting post-stall pressure drag in order to rapidly decelerate to land on a perch. Stall is typically associated with a loss of control authority, and it is tempting to attribute this agility of birds to the intricate morphology of the wings and tail, to their precision sensing apparatus, or their ability to perform thrust vectoring. Here we ask whether an extremely simple fixed-wing glider (no propeller) with only a single actuator in the tail is capable of landing precisely on a perch from a large range of initial conditions. To answer this question, we focus on the design of the flight control system; building upon previous work which used linear feedback control design based on quadratic regulators (LQR), we develop nonlinear feedback control based on nonlinear model-predictive control and 'LQR-Trees'. Through simulation using a flat-plate model of the glider, we find that both nonlinear methods are capable of achieving an accurate bird-like perching maneuver from a large range of initial conditions; the 'LQR-Trees' algorithm is particularly useful due to its low computational burden at runtime and its inherent performance guarantees. With this in mind, we then implement the 'LQR-Trees' algorithm on real hardware and demonstrate a 95 percent perching success rate over 147 flights for a wide range of initial speeds. These results suggest that, at least in the absence of significant disturbances like wind gusts, complex wing morphology and sensing are not strictly required to achieve accurate and robust perching even in the post-stall flow regime.United States. Office of Naval Research. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (N00014-10-1-0951)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award IIS-0915148

Adaptive Airborne Separation to Enable UAM Autonomy in Mixed Airspace

The excitement and promise generated by Urban Air Mobility (UAM) concepts have inspired both new entrants and large aerospace companies throughout the world to invest hundreds of millions in research and development of air vehicles, both piloted and unpiloted, to fulfill these dreams. The management and separation of all these new aircraft have received much less attention, however, and even though NASAs lead is advancing some promising concepts for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM), most operations today are limited to line of sight with the vehicle, airspace reservation and geofencing of individual flights. Various schemes have been proposed to control this new traffic, some modeled after conventional air traffic control and some proposing fully automatic management, either from a ground-based entity or carried out on board among the vehicles themselves. Previous work has examined vehicle-based traffic management in the very low altitude airspace within a metroplex called UTM airspace in which piloted traffic is rare. A management scheme was proposed in that work that takes advantage of the homogeneous nature of the traffic operating in UTM airspace. This paper expands that concept to include a traffic management plan usable at all altitudes desired for electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing urban and short-distance, inter-city transportation. The interactions with piloted aircraft operating under both visual and instrument flight rules are analyzed, and the role of Air Traffic Control services in the postulated mixed traffic environment is covered. Separation values that adapt to each type of traffic encounter are proposed, and the relationship between required airborne surveillance range and closure speed is given. Finally, realistic scenarios are presented illustrating how this concept can reliably handle the density and traffic mix that fully implemented and successful UAM operations would entail

A survey of free software for the design, analysis, modelling, and simulation of an unmanned aerial vehicle

The objective of this paper is to analyze free software for the design, analysis, modelling, and simulation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Free software is the best choice when the reduction of production costs is necessary; nevertheless, the quality of free software may vary. This paper probably does not include all of the free software, but tries to describe or mention at least the most interesting programs. The first part of this paper summarizes the essential knowledge about UAVs, including the fundamentals of flight mechanics and aerodynamics, and the structure of a UAV system. The second section generally explains the modelling and simulation of a UAV. In the main section, more than 50 free programs for the design, analysis, modelling, and simulation of a UAV are described. Although the selection of the free software has been focused on small subsonic UAVs, the software can also be used for other categories of aircraft in some cases; e.g. for MAVs and large gliders. The applications with an historical importance are also included. Finally, the results of the analysis are evaluated and discussed—a block diagram of the free software is presented, possible connections between the programs are outlined, and future improvements of the free software are suggested. © 2015, CIMNE, Barcelona, Spain.Internal Grant Agency of Tomas Bata University in Zlin [IGA/FAI/2015/001, IGA/FAI/2014/006

Visual navigation and path tracking using street geometry information for image alignment and servoing

Single camera-based navigation systems need information from other sensors or from the work environment to produce reliable and accurate position measurements. Providing such trustable, accurate, and available information in the environment is very important. The work highlights that the availability of well-described streets in urban environments can be exploited by drones for navigation and path tracking purposes, thus benefitting from such structures is not limited to only automated driving cars. While the drone position is continuously computed using visual odometry, scene matching is used to correct the position drift depending on some landmarks. The drone path is defined by several waypoints, and landmarks centralized by those waypoints are carefully chosen in the street intersections. The known streets’ geometry and dimensions are used to estimate the image scale and orientation which are necessary for images alignment, to compensate for the visual odometry drift, and to pass closer to the landmark center by the visual servoing process. Probabilistic Hough transform is used to detect and extract the street borders. The system is realized in a simulation environment consisting of the Robot Operating System ROS, 3D dynamic simulator Gazebo, and IRIS drone model. The results prove the suggested system efficiency with a 1.4 m position RMS error

Crossbow Volume 1

Student Integrated ProjectIncludes supplementary materialDistributing naval combat power into many small ships and unmanned air vehicles that capitalize on emerging technology offers a transformational way to think about naval combat in the littorals in the 2020 time frame. Project CROSSBOW is an engineered systems of systems that proposes to use such distributed forces to provide forward presence to gain and maiantain access, to provide sea control, and to project combat power in the littoral regions of the world. Project CROSSBOW is the result of a yearlong, campus-wide, integrated research systems engineering effort involving 40 student researchers and 15 supervising faculty members. This report (Volume I) summarizes the CROSSBOW project. It catalogs the major features of each of the components, and includes by reference a separate volume for each of the major systems (ships, aircraft, and logistics). It also prresents the results of the mission and campaign analysis that informed the trade-offs between these components. It describes certain functions of CROSSBOW in detail through specialized supporting studies. The student work presented here is technologically feasible, integrated and imaginative. The student project cannot by itself provide definitive designs or analyses covering such a broad topic. It does strongly suggest that the underlying concepts have merit and deserve further serious study by the Navy as it transforms itself