Apex, an elaboration of the three-tier type architecture used successfully in many autonomy applications, is designed around the concept of modular reasoning and control services (RCSs) with response-time characteristics as a primary factor in module delineation. We believe this approach reflects a valuable synthesis of requirements from diverse missions types and systems, and avoids pitfalls c...

The effectiveness of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is being increased to reduce the cost and risk of a mission [Doherty et al. 2000]. Since the advent of small sized but high performance UAVs, the use of a group of UAVs for performing a joint mission is of major interest. However, the development of a UAV is expensive, and a small error in automatic control results in a crash. Therefore, it i...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly useful for several different applications. One issue faced in the growing popularity of UAVs is collision avoidance. With multiple aircraft in a finite airspace, some sort of algorithm must be used in order to avoid near misses and collisions while staying within reasonable bounds for a given mission. This paper proposes a new algorithm ...

This paper proposes new techniques for aircraft shape estimation, passive ranging, and shapeadaptive hidden Markov model filtering which are suitable for a monocular vision-based noncooperative collision avoidance system. Visionbased passive ranging is an important missing technology that could play a significant role in resolving the sense-and-avoid problem in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); ...

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...

In this paper a task allocation problem for multi-UAV systems was considered. The possibility of applying a consensus approach to organize a distribution of tasks in an autonomous group of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is studied. The use of several small UAVs with autonomous distribution of tasks gives a significant advantage over the use of a single UAV. The well-known consensus proto...

Recently, technological advances have been focused on the cockpit of modern unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in order to reduce pilot requirements and workload to operate them. First person view (FPV) flight represents a key point when UAVs perform tasks beyond the line of sight. This paper presents the design and implementation of a cockpit for a remotely operated quadrotor. We have developed a...

Military services have an active interest in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for applications including surveillance and unmanned combat. In the future, UAV swarms will be able to gather intelligence cooperatively without human intervention. Since the physical employment of UAV swarm technology is not yet economical, simulation is often used to explore their design. This paper discus...

This paper deals with a nonlinear feedback control method based on Lie derivatives for the navigation guidance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The paper proposes a modelling concept for planar and three-dimensional navigation together with proven algorithms to cope with the autonomous navigation along waypoints and on loiters. The steps that were performed in order to validate the autonomou...

To ensure safe operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), component hazards need to be dealt with robustly through effective fault diagnosis. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) has proven popular in this realm, though it is known to suffer from linearisation errors that can degrade performance. This paper presents results from initial simulation trials that address sensor fault detection and i...