Key technologies for safe and autonomous drones

Drones/UAVs are able to perform air operations that are very difficult to be performed by manned aircrafts. In addition, drones' usage brings significant economic savings and environmental benefits, while reducing risks to human life. In this paper, we present key technologies that enable development of drone systems. The technologies are identified based on the usages of drones (driven by COMP4DRONES project use cases). These technologies are grouped into four categories: U-space capabilities, system functions, payloads, and tools. Also, we present the contributions of the COMP4DRONES project to improve existing technologies. These contributions aim to ease drones’ customization, and enable their safe operation.This project has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 826610. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Spain, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands. The total project budget is 28,590,748.75 EUR (excluding ESIF partners), while the requested grant is 7,983,731.61 EUR to ECSEL JU, and 8,874,523.84 EUR of National and ESIF Funding. The project has been started on 1st October 2019

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2019

This Research Report presents the FY19 research statistics and contributions of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management (EN) at AFIT. AFIT research interests and faculty expertise cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to USAF needs, as reflected by the range of topics addressed in the faculty and student publications listed in this report. In most cases, the research work reported herein is directly sponsored by one or more USAF or DOD agencies. AFIT welcomes the opportunity to conduct research on additional topics of interest to the USAF, DOD, and other federal organizations when adequate manpower and financial resources are available and/or provided by a sponsor. In addition, AFIT provides research collaboration and technology transfer benefits to the public through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). Interested individuals may discuss ideas for new research collaborations, potential CRADAs, or research proposals with individual faculty using the contact information in this document

Analysis of simulator feasibility in development of wireless sensor network applications

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of small autonomous electronic devices that sense environmental conditions and communicate over wireless links. WSNs have applications in various fields of science and technology, which are diverse and typically exist in remote areas with harsh conditions. This makes testing and debugging of applications time consuming, costly and sometimes even impossible for application developers. Hence, simulators are used to develop and test WSN applications to verify the functionality of applications without actual deployment and to avoid debugging and testing costs. Selection of a feasible simulator for WSN application development requires analysis and comparison of available WSN simulators. A feasible simulator fulfils application requirements and presents related features. Existing comparison surveys and articles present strengths and weaknesses of WSN simulators. They do not concentrate on the attributes of simulators, which an application developer should consider in selecting a feasible WSN simulator before application development. In this thesis, WSN simulators are analyzed and their attributes are collected, which can be used in selecting a feasible simulator for application development. Three types of attributes are collected: 1) activity attributes, 2) basic attributes, 3) core attributes. Activity attributes present how active and up-to-date the WSN simulators are. Basic attributes specify the type, category and development language of WSN simulators. Core attributes present the availability of core WSN requirements such as, scalability, consumed power and memory calculation modules in simulators. Seven simulators are compared using these attributes. Requirements for typical WSN applications are defined and consist of multi-hop routing, calculation of execution time, power and memory consumption of nodes. The feasibilities of the simulators are measured against the application requirements. COOJA meets all the requirements and seems feasible for WSN application development and testing. Feasibility of COOJA simulator is verified experimentally by developing three test applications. In the first application, COOJA simulates multi-hop network and provides four types of statistics, which are network, power, sensor and topology statistics. In the second application, COOJA measures power and memory consumption. In the third application, power consumption is measured for each function call of the application program. COOJA fulfils all requirements and is found feasible for WSN application development and testing

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2015

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems Engineering and Management, Operational Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics and Engineering Physics

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2015

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems Engineering and Management, Operational Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics and Engineering Physics