In this paper, we present a hierarchical guidance and control system designed for rotorcraft-based unmanned aerial vehicles (RUAVs) for cooperative multi-agent scenarios. The issues of multi-agent system is resolved with a distributed hierarchical structure, which gradually transforms abstract mission commands into realtime control signals for multiple numbers of agents. The cooperative operati...

In this paper we aim to discuss adaptive flocking control of multiple Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) by using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). We utilize a Quadrotor to provide the positions of all agents and also to manage the shrinking or expanding of the agents with respect to the environmental changes. The proposed method adaptively causes changing in the sensing range of the ground robot...

This paper concerns recent work on the application of optic flow for control and navigation of small unmanned aerial vehicles. Bio-inspired strategies, such as the use of optic flow, have always motivated researchers in the control community. Recent methodologies for active and passive navigation of aerial vehicles using optic flow, such as obstacle detection or terrain following, are presented...

This paper presents recent research efforts to extend the functionality of unmanned aerial vehicles beyond passive observation to active interaction with and manipulation of objects. The archetypical aerial manipulation task — grasping objects during flight — is difficult due to the unstable dynamics of flying vehicles and limited positional accuracy currently demonstrated by hovering vehicles....

In this paper a framework for simulation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), oriented to rotary wings aerial vehicles, is presented. It allows UAVs simulation for stand-alone agent or multi-agent exchanging data in cooperative scenarios. The framework, based on modularity and stratification in different specialized layers, allows an easy switching from simulated to real environments, thus reduc...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are gaining more and more attention during the last few years due to their important contributions and cost-effective applications in several tasks such as surveillance, search and rescue missions, geographic studies, as well as various military and security applications. Due to the requirements of autonomous flight under different flight conditions without a pil...

State-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicles are typically able to autonomously execute a preplanned mission. However, unmanned aerial vehicles usually fly in a very dynamic environment that requires dynamic changes to the flight plan; this mission management activity is usually tasked to human supervision. Through the use of a set of theoretical concepts that allow the description of a flight pla...

We address the problem of deploying groups of tens or hundreds of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in urban environments where a group of aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used to coordinate the ground vehicles. We envision a hierarchy in which UAVs with aerial cameras can be used to monitor and command a swarm of UGVs, controlling the splitting and merging of the swarm into groups and the shape (di...

Mission Planning software uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) sources and dynamic aggregation of geo-referenced data to provide an information-rich context for human-directed creation of missions that are, for the most part, vehicle-independent. This requires a connection between the universal Mission Planner and an heterogeneous groups of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), payloads and ass...

A short range wireless network platform, based on Bluetooth technology and on a Round Robin scheduling is presented. The objective is to build an application independent platform, to support a distributed sensing and actuation control system, which will be used in an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). This platform provides the advantages of wireless communications while assuring low weight, small ...