Recent military and civil actions worldwide have highlighted the potential utility for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Both fixed wing and rotary aircraft have contributed significantly to the success of several military and surveillance/rescue operations. Future combat operations will continue to place unmanned aircraft in challenging conditions such as the urban warfare environment. However,...

Recent years have seen rapidly growing interest in the development of networks of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (U.A.V.s), as aerial sensor networks for the purpose of coordinated monitoring, surveillance, and rapid emergency response. This has triggered a great deal of research in higher levels of planning and control, including collaborative sensing and exploration, synchronized motion pl...

In this paper we propose a new method to detect and track multiple moving targets on image sequences recorded by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Our approach focuses on challenging urban scenarios, where several object are simultaneously moving in various directions, and we must expect frequent occlusions caused by other moving vehicles or static scene objects such as buildings and bridges. In...

Cameras provide a rich source of information while being passive, cheap and lightweight for small and medium Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In this work we present the first implementation of receding horizon control, which is widely used in ground vehicles, with monocular vision as the only sensing mode for autonomous UAV flight in dense clutter. We make it feasible on UAVs via a number of c...

Quadrotor UAVs are one of the most preferred type of small unmanned aerial vehicles because of the very simple mechanical construction and propulsion principle. However, the nonlinear dynamic behavior requires a more advanced stabilizing control and guidance of these vehicles. In addition, the small payload reduces the amount of batteries that can be carried and thus also limits the operating r...

Recently, there has been immense interest in using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for civilian operations. As a result, unmanned aerial systems traffic management is needed to ensure the safety and goal satisfaction of potentially thousands of UAVs flying simultaneously. Currently, the analysis of large multi-agent systems cannot tractably provide these guarantees if the agents’ set of maneuve...

In this paper a Control software Architecture for cooperative multiple unmanned aerial Vehicle-manIpulator Systems (CAVIS) is presented. In particular, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with a robotic manipulator eventually involved in a cooperative object transportation mission are considered. Such robotic systems involve specific constraints given by the interaction of the degrees of f...

Safety and cybersecurity are two emergent behaviors critical to mission success of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This paper presents the concepts driving the initial research investigation of a hazard and vulnerability analysis for the integration of manned-unmanned aerial systems (UAS) using System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA). The motivation for this analysis is the need to engineer s...

Advances in technology for miniature electronic military equipment and systems have led to the emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as the new weapons of war and tools used in various other areas. UAVs can easily be controlled from a remote location. They are being used for critical operations, including offensive, reconnaissance, surveillance and other civilian missions. The need to se...

The development of advanced indoor navigation systems for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has aroused extensive interest recently because of its great potential. In comparison to outdoor flight, indoor navigation poses several unique challenges in stability and control for quadcopter operability. This review paper investigates these research challenges and explores solutions that exist to addre...