Unmanned planetary landers to date have landed "blind"; that is, without the benefit of onboard landing hazard detection and avoidance systems. This constrains landing site selection to very benign terrain, which in turn constrains the scientific agenda of missions. The state of the art Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) technology can land a spacecraft on Mars somewhere within a 20-100km landin...

Direct-lift micro air vehicles have important applications in reconnaissance. In order to conduct persistent surveillance in urban environments, it is essential that these systems can perform autonomous landing maneuvers on elevated surfaces that provide high vantage points without the help of any external sensor and with a fully contained on-board software solution. In this paper, we present a...

Introduction: With NASA’s return to the Moon, the determination of safe landing sites for future robotic and human missions is crucial, and rock abundance will be important criteria for landing site selection. Thermal inertias derived from remote sensing in the thermal infrared is a powerful technique for assessing rock abundance for the purpose of landing site selection on Mars [1,2]. Rocks a ...

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) is one of the few technologies that will help in reducing both maintenance and operational costs, while improving the overall safety of an aircraft. It also helps in moving away from conservative design philosophies. Hence IVHM is increasingly being adopted in various aircraft programs. IVHM requires a multi-disciplinary approach bringing together the...

Airport traffic consists of aircraft performing landing, takeoff and taxi procedures. It is controlled by air traffic controller (ATC). To safely perform this task he/she uses traffic surveillance equipment and voice communication systems to issue control clearances. One of the most important indicators of this process efficiency is practical airport capacity, which refers to the number of airc...

The adaptive neural fuzzy inference system is used to simulate trajectory tracking in aircraft landing operationsmanagement. The advantage of the approach is that by using the linguistic representation ability of fuzzy sets and the learning ability of neural networks, the approximate linguistic representations can be improved or updated as more data become available. This approach is illustrate...

In this thesis the potential of visual servoing techniques for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) UAV platforms is explored. An overview of UAV applications and state-of-theart quadrotors is provided, backed up by the necessary theoretical background. Visual servoing based solutions of the important flight tasks (such as vertical take-off and landing, obstacle avoidance and attitude estimatio...

Much research has been done on the construct of user satisfaction over the past 20 years. In fact, user satisfaction is probably the most studied construct in information systems research. Despite this attention, reported results have been inconclusive and sometimes contradictory. Is it possible that something else is occurring in this relationship that has not been modeled in past studies? Per...

This paper outlines the design of a 2D analogue for autonomous landing on an asteroid as a hardware demonstrator/development platform, within an overall requirements structure that aims to develop a generic architecture for autonomous landing systems. Although wheeled laboratory robots may appear to be unlikely analogues for asteroid landing, the system is already proving useful as a platform f...

Landing gear suspension systems fulfill the tasks of absorbing the vertical energy of the touch-down as well as providing passenger and crew comfort with a smooth ground ride before take-off and after landing. They are also designed to have optimal performance in the case of a hard landing. In general, the tasks of aircraft landing gears are complex and sometimes lead to a number of contradicto...