In recent years autonomous robots, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in particular, are becoming always more important in the context of emergency scenarios, being able to anticipate the actions of human operators and to support them during rescue operations. In this context, the investigation of strategies for the autonomous control of UAVs, for the development of Human-Swarm Interfaces and ...

We consider the problem of designing scalable and portable controllers for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to reach time-varying formations as quickly as possible. This brief confirms that deep reinforcement learning can be used in a multi-agent fashion to drive UAVs to reach any formation while taking into account optimality and portability. We use a deep neural network to estimate how good a ...

In this paper we present a solution for formation flight and formation reconfiguration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Based on a virtual leader approach, combined with an extended local potential field, the method is universal applicable by driving the vehicle’s auto pilot. The solution is verified, using a group of UAVs based on a simplified small-scale helicopter, which is simulated in M...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being deployed in a vast variety of military, civilian, industrial and agricultural applications. Dynamics modeling is an essential step towards designing autonomous controllers for UAV systems. The dynamics modeling on the other hand requires accurate records of the UAVs motion states during real flight tests, this is usually achieved using Inertial Measurem...

Fifty-four licensed pilots carried out multiple surveillance missions on two high-fidelity simulations representing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In Experiment 1, pilots were required to operate a single UAV through three different mission conditions: a baseline condition, one that offloaded relevant information to the auditory channel, and one that provided automation of flight path control...

Because of the key characteristics of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), removal of pilot, UAVs will be highly suited for repetitive, dirty, and dangerous operations. A wide range of civil and military applications are being explored in the community (Clapper et al., 2007). As a result, UAVs are given serious considerations in worldwide, making them the next step in evolution of aviation. Whateve...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been increasingly used for exploring areas. Many mobility algorithms were designed to achieve a fast coverage of a given area. We focus on analysing the expected coverage of the symmetric random walk algorithm with independent mobility. Therefore we proof the dependence of certain events and develop Markov models, in order to provide an analytical solution f...

In this white paper, certifiable communications middleware is overviewed within the context of a specific safety-critical application: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Actual UAV use cases have proven that certifiable communications middleware can deliver cost savings in the range of $2 million. Equivalent savings are realistic for any project that must meet stringent safety-certification crite...

We present an agent-based coordination and planning method for autonomous aerial surveillance of multiple urban areas using a group of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The goal of the surveillance is to observe a set of ground points of interest within the target areas as often as possible. The method differs from the existing work by explicit consideration of sensor occlusions that ...

Fast and computationally less complex feature extraction for moving object detection using aerial images from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) remains as an elusive goal in the field of computer vision research. The types of features used in current studies concerning moving object detection are typically chosen based on improving detection rate rather than on providing fast and computationally ...