An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is controlled by an embedded system that works autonomously by following commands stored in an internal computer. An UAV contains elements that may vary according to the domain application. Thus, such elements might be managed by the Software Product Line (PL) approach. UAVs and PLs use different tools for managing their specifications and models. Therefore, thi...

The United States has seen a three-decade-long history of poor outcomes in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) development efforts. Technical problems have led to cost growth and schedule slip as well as to disappointing operational results. Costs have tended to escalate so much during development that the resulting systems have cost more than users have been willing to pay, precipitating program can...

The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research has shown rapid development in recent years and offers a great number of research challenges for distributed autonomous robotics systems. In this article, a prototype distributed architecture for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle experimentation is presented which supports the development of intelligent capabilities and th...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are being increasingly used in growing number of applications. The use of single vehicle is often not enough due to various limitations, such as available power or sensors installed. Therefore the UAVs are formed into cooperative teams that operate as the distributed processing system realizing the given mission with one or more objectives (tasks) defined. The key...

Unmanned aerial and ground vehicle teams present a majoropportunity for expanded operation over individual autonomous vehicles alone. The different perspectives available for sensors, the different operating ranges and payload capabilities, and the ability to observe a target environment from all angles at once all add up to significant improvements in ability to search for and track targets, t...

[1] ABSTRACT The International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) is designed for colleges and universities to compete in the design and construction of an autonomous aerial vehicle. Pima Community College is being represented by the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Club. The UAV Club has designed a primary vehicle and three subvehicles that will be used in the competition. The vehicles were desig...

Improvement of the launch phase of a jet powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO), has been the subject of attention in the UAV industry. Use of flight simulation tools reduces the risk and required some amount of flight testing for complex aerospace systems. Full nonlinear equations of motion are used to study and simulate this maneuver and three case studies of ...

Quad rotor is a renowned underactuated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with widespread military and civilian applications. Despite its simple structure, the vehicle suffers from inherent instability. Therefore, control designers always face formidable challenge in stabilization and control goal. In this paper fuzzy membership functions of the quad rotor’s fuzzy controllers are optimized using nat...

The paper presents a method of terrain classification and path planning for unmanned ground vehicles. The terrain classification is done on imagery that is acquired from UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) or satellite and is used for UGV (unmanned ground vehicle) path planning thus introducing collaboration capabilities to the system of two. The system complements the UGV on-board navigation system ...