This paper investigates the rendezvous problem for autonomous cooperative landing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on surface (USV). Such heterogeneous agents, with nonlinear dynamics, are dynamically decoupled but share a common task. The underlying control scheme is based distributed Model Predictive Control (MPC). main contribution algorithm online update rule location. only requires agen...

The purpose of this study was to investigate muscle activation patterns during a landing task in boys and girls through the use of muscle synergies. Electromyographical data from six lower extremity muscles were collected from 11 boys and 16 girls while they performed single-leg drop-landings. Electromyographical data from six leg muscles were rectified, smoothed, and normalized to maximum dyna...

Aerial and ground vehicles working in corporation are crucial assets for several real world applications, ranging from search and rescue to logistics. Here we turn our attention to high level languages or team plans [3, 2, 4, 1] for modeling a cooperative scenario, where the UAV/UGV team should operate in tight cooperation to perform a joint task. In this context, by tight coordination we mean ...

The compliance of elastic elements allows muscles to dissipate energy safely during eccentric contractions. This buffering function is well documented in animal models but our understanding of its mechanism in humans is confined to non-specific tasks, requiring a subsequent acceleration of the body. The present study aimed to examine the behaviour of the human triceps surae muscle-tendon unit (...

PURPOSE Evidence concerning the alteration of knee function during landing suffers from a lack of consensus. This uncertainty can be attributed to methodological flaws, particularly in relation to the statistical analysis of variable human movement data. The aim of this study was to compare single-subject and group analyses in detecting changes in knee stiffness and coordination during step lan...

People often read the same text more than once. Studying eye movements during multiple readings of the same texts provides a unique opportunity to observe the consistency of saccadic landing positions. Eye movements were recorded while 5 people read the same 4 texts more than 40 times, no more than 4 times/day, and never on consecutive trials. Other texts, read only once, were interspersed. Com...

We have attached ACT-R to the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL’s) Uninhabited Air Vehicle (UAV) Synthetic Task Environment (STE). The UAV STE is a high fidelity simulation of the Predator RQ1A UAV with built in basic maneuvering, landing, and reconnaissance tasks and data collection capabilities. The UAV STE’s design and capabilities are described in detail in Schreiber, Lyon, Martin, and ...

We present preliminary experiments of an aerial deployment system for environmental sensors with autorotative soft-landing. Key problems associated with this task are discussed, including design of the sensor modules, release mechanism and telemetry system. We evaluate performance of the initial proof-of-concept system and show that this approach to sensor deployment is viable.

Guidance and control of aircraft in the landing phase imposes extra pilot work loads, hence application of automatic landing control systems is of great importance. In this study automatic landing control systems are introduced and an optimal landing control system is designed. The control system performance criteria are based on minimum control effort. The designed system is simulated for a tr...