A passivity-based control of Vertical Take-off and Landing (VToL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is presented in this paper. An estimator of unmodeled dynamics and external wrench (forces plus moments) acting on the aerial vehicle and based on the momentum of the system is employed to compensate such disturbances effects. This arrangement allows VToL UAVs to perform hovering, tracking and aeri...

We formally define the aerial scanning problem. A set of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cooperate to frequently scan a given geographic area. Each UAV can only photograph a small portion of it at a time. Each UAV maintains the necessary information to create a global picture of the geographic area. This global picture consists of smaller pictures that are taken within small time of each other ...

In this article, we attempt to document a technical overview on modern miniature unmanned rotorcraft systems. We first give a brief review on the historical development of the rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and then move on to present a fairly detailed and general overview on the hardware configuration, software integration, aerodynamic modeling and automatic flight control system ...

There are many aerial missions in hostile urban and indoor environments where human intervention is considered difficult or dangerous. Accomplishment of such missions require use of unmanned autonomous aerial vehicles (UAV). Unmanned air vehicles for such missions must be equipped with a fully autonomous navigation system. Many methods that have been proposed for navigation of autonomous system...

Title of Thesis: Multi-target Detection, Tracking, and Data Association on Road Networks Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Brett E. Barkley, Master of Science, 2017 Thesis directed by: Professor Derek A. Paley Department of Aerospace Engineering A cooperative detection and tracking algorithm for multiple targets constrained to a road network is presented for fixed-wing Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs)...

Miniature unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles have become popular due to their compact size, high maneuverability and high payload-to-size ratio. Such vehicles have shown great potential in surveillance and search and rescue; however the “onthe-ground” processing methods implemented are rather insufficient. This paper presents a low cost, h...

We present Dolphin, an extensible programming language for autonomous vehicle networks. A Dolphin program expresses an orchestrated execution of tasks defined compositionally for multiple vehicles. Building upon the base case of elementary one-vehicle tasks, the built-in operators include support for composing tasks in several forms, for instance according to concurrent, sequential, or event-ba...

The arena of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has for many years been dominated by the defence industries. The reason for this can be attributed to the complexity and cost of designing, constructing and operating of these vehicles. An additional contributing factor is the legislative issues around operating an unmanned aircraft in civilian airspace. However in resent years advances in micro-elec...

This article presents an aerial tool towards the autonomous cooperative coverage and inspection of a 3D infrastructure using multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In the presented approach the UAVs are relying only on their onboard computer and sensory system, deployed for inspection of the 3D structure. In this application each agent covers a different part of the scene autonomously, while...