When unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used for surveillance, information must often be transmitted to a base station in real time. However, limited communication ranges and the common requirement of free line of sight may make direct transmissions from distant targets impossible. This problem can be solved using relay chains consisting of one or more intermediate relay UAVs. This leads to th...

This paper presents a method to control height and speed of fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using MATLAB platform. The mathematical dynamic model of Six Degrees of Freedom (6-DOF) aircraft is nonlinear and it is linearized about a flight condition. System is divided into two Multi Input Multi Output (MIMO) sub models. First model controls the longitudinal dynamics and second model is...

Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly popular for tasks such as surveillance or target tracking in various types of tactical missions. Traditionally, each UAV in a mission is controlled by one or more operators. In our previous work we have developed a collection of distributed algorithms that allow one operator to control a whole team of small UAVs. Here, we report on...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are changing workflows in a variety of different fields ranging from security to cinematography. In particular, agriculture is a field that is poised to strongly benefit from this technology. In this paper, we use an ethnographic field study to gauge the current perception of UAVs in the farming community. A Grounded Theory analysis of interviews with stakeholder...

As Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become more readily available and reduce in cost, using multiple UAVs simultaneously to accomplish a task becomes increasingly attractive. Once swarms of UAVs share the same workspace (operational environment) it is necessary to have a means to rapidly adopt an optimal collision-free formation in the workspace. A popular approach for formation of an optimal sw...

The goal of information gathering is to obtain data from the environment generating an accurate model for the application of interest. In many applications the information gathering process requires to obtain measurement of the phenomena of interest in harsh or dangerous conditions (e.g., environmental monitoring applications of water in a lake or search and rescue operations in disaster respon...

We present an agent-based coordination and planning method for aerial surveillance of multiple urban areas using a group of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The method differs from the existing work by explicit consideration of sensor occlusions that can occur due to high buildings and other obstacles in the target area. The solution employs a decomposition of the problem in two subp...

The problem of developing distributed control and navigation system for quadrotor UAVs operating in GPS-denied environments is addressed in the paper. Cooperative navigation, marker detection and mapping task solved by a team of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles is chosen as demo example. Developed intelligent control system complies with on 4D\RCS reference model and its implementation is base...

This is the summary of the research being done at Cal Poly Pomona at an undergraduate level on the development of obstacle avoidance capability for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A quadrotor UAV is used as the research platform. Push and Rapidly Exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithms are used for the obstacle avoidance capability. The paper shows the use of cheaper commercial off-the-shelf se...

This paper presents our distributed approach to dynamically assign new goals to a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Decisions to assign new goals are not instantaneous and they tend to become obsolete because UAVs move continuously. We use the date of commitment to handle this. This paper introduces how we use a function relating the arrival date to the date of commitment in order to po...