Outdoor positioning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) commonly relies on GPS signals, which might be reflected or blocked in urban areas. In such cases, additional on-board sensors such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) are desirable. To fuse GPS and LiDAR measurements, it is important, yet challenging, to accurately characterize the error covariance of the sensor measurements. In this p...

Forensic Res Criminol Int J 2017, 4(1): 00094 enforcement agencies must be able to quickly and effectively secure a crime scene and preserve evidence for use in court and criminal proceedings. In the event of a major crime such as a homicide, getting evidence quickly becomes an extremely critical problem. Footprints, tire tracks and other evidence that is easy to disturb may be left at the crim...

Path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is one the vital components that supports their autonomy and deployment ability in real-world applications. Few path-planning techniques have been thoroughly considered for multirotor UAVs pursuing ground moving targets (GMTs) with variable speed direction. Furthermore, most are generally devised without taking into consideration wind disturbance...

Abstract Over the last decades, evolution of technology has helped us to facilitate various types works in areas related land and property management as well spatial planning. The exploitation new tools methods prompted international interest recording modeling geospatial information more than two dimensions depicted traditional projects, until then. This contributed address a series issues int...

This paper discusses the integration of health monitoring and flight control systems for small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). After briefly reviewing previous fuzzy logic controllers (FLC) of air vehicles, a very low cost integration method is proposed. The proposed fuzzy logic (FL) selects the best gain values for the operation of PD or PID controllers of the autonomous flight system accordi...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have recently received notable attention because of their wide range of applications in urban civilian use and in warfare. With air traffic densities increasing, it is more and more important for UAVs to be able to predict and avoid collisions. The main goal of this research effort is to adjust real-time trajectories for cooperative UAVs to avoid collisions in th...

Thermal soaring saves much energy, but flying large distances in this form represents a great challenge for birds, people and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The solution is to make use of the so-called thermals, which are localized, warmer regions in the atmosphere moving upward with a speed exceeding the descent rate of birds and planes. Saving energy by exploiting the environment more effic...

We construct an optimization model that assists commanders, operators, and planners to effectively deploy and employ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in special operations missions. Specifically, we consider situations where targets (e.g., insurgents) operate in a region of interest and a small special operations team is assigned to search and detect these targets. The special operations team is...

This paper presents a collision-free decentralized hybrid supervisory control approach for the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that are involved in a leader-follower formation mission. Towards this end, a symbolic motion planning scheme is developed to polarly partition the motion space, which results in a finite state discrete model for the motion dynamics of each UAV. Then, a modular discrete...

One hundred and three years ago the aviation age began with the Wright brothers in Kittyhawk, North Carolina. It is well known that manned aviation has made tremendous progress over the decades that followed. Less familiar are the deep history and roots of unmanned aviation, which is often thought of as a recent phenomenon. Initially, modern unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were instruments of w...