Autonomous aerial refueling (AAR) is an important capability for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to increase its flying range and endurance without increasing its size. This paper presents a novel tracking method that utilizes both 2D intensity and 3D point-cloud data acquired with a 3D Flash LIDAR sensor to establish relative position and orientation between the receiver vehicle and drogue du...

A two‐dimensional model investigating the hydrogen charging process in a combination reactor filled with both LaNi4.3Al0.4Mn0.3 and 2LiNH2‐1.1MgH2‐0.1LiBH4‐3wt.%ZrCoH3 materials has been developed. The selected configuration is a cylindrical reactor of 32 cm of diameter where the MeH is filled in annular tubes separated from the complex hydride bed by a gas permeable layer. The diffusion of hy...

We consider the problem of finding the least cost route for an aircraft between a predetermined starting and target location while ensuring either enough fuel is on board or acquired en route via refueling for completion of the route. Other considerations of this problem include adherence to regulations for threat and no-fly zones and to regulations for the minimum fuel needed on an aircraft in...

The United States Air Force Air Mobility Command (AMC) is responsible for managing hundreds of airlift and air refueling missions every week on a global scale. Allocating airframes and flight crews to individual missions is a large and complex problem. We have built the AMC Airlift and Air Refueling Allocator to assist planners and schedulers in this task, and the tool is currently transitionin...

Motivated by the urgent demand for the electric vehicle (EV) fast refueling technologies, battery swapping and charging stations (BSCSs) are envisioned as a promising solution to provide timely EV refueling services. However, inappropriate battery charging operation in BSCSs can not only incur unnecessary high charging cost but also threaten the reliability of the power grid. In this paper, we ...

An essential capability for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to extend its airborne duration without increasing the size of the aircraft is called the autonomous aerial refueling (AAR). This paper proposes a sensor-in-the-loop, non-tracking method for probe-and-drogue style autonomous aerial refueling tasks by combining sensitivity adjustments of a 3D Flash LIDAR camera with computer vision bas...

Plasma metabolites provide information about the physiological state and fuel use of birds, and have been used for predicting refueling rates of birds during migratory stopovers. However, little is known about the effect of diet on metabolite concentrations in small songbirds. We investigated the effect of dietary macronutrient composition on lipid and protein metabolites in captive White-throa...

Neuronal population oscillations at a variety of frequencies can be readily seen in electroencephalographic (EEG) as well as local field potential recordings in many different species. Although these brain rhythms have been studied for many years, the methods for identifying discrete oscillatory epochs are still widely variable across studies. The "better oscillation detection" (BOSC) method ap...