This paper presents an integrated methodology for addressing safety concerns during the systems engineering of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS). We describe both the systems and safety engineering activities performed, their interrelations, and how they complement range safety analysis. The broad goal of this work is to support the derivation of an airworthiness statement, and the subsequ...

Geographic information systems (GIS) now provide accurate maps of terrain, roads, waterways, and building footprints and heights. Aircraft, particularly small unmanned aircraft systems, can exploit additional information such as building roof structure to improve navigation accuracy and safety particularly in urban regions. This paper proposes a method to automatically label building roof shape...

This paper describes methods for design of a hand-launchable, back-packable unmanned aerial vehicle for long endurance flight. The proposed design methods involve the development of empirical and physicsbased contributing analyses to model the performance of the aircraft subsystems. The contributing analyses are collected into a design structure matrix which is used to map aircraft performance ...

Guidance and control of aircraft in the landing phase imposes extra pilot work loads, hence application of automatic landing control systems is of great importance. In this study automatic landing control systems are introduced and an optimal landing control system is designed. The control system performance criteria are based on minimum control effort. The designed system is simulated for a tr...

OBJECTIVE This study examined operators' capacity to successfully reallocate highly autonomous in-flight missiles to time-sensitive targets while performing secondary tasks of varying complexity. BACKGROUND Regardless of the level of autonomy for unmanned systems, humans will be necessarily involved in the mission planning, higher level operation, and contingency interventions, otherwise know...

Autonomous Search and Surveillance with Small Fixed Wing Aircraft by Timothy Garland McGee Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering-Mechanical Engineering University of California, Berkeley Professor J. Karl Hedrick, Chair Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to act as low cost tools in a variety of both civilian and military applications including traffic monitoring, border patr...