For decades detection and monitoring of forest and other wildland fires has relied heavily on aircraft (and satellites). Technical advances and improved affordability of both sensors and sensor platforms promise to revolutionize the way aircraft detect, monitor and help suppress wildfires. Sensor systems like hyperspectral cameras, image intensifiers and thermal cameras that have previously bee...

Small unmanned aircraft systems are envisioned to play a major role in surveilling critical assets, collecting data, and delivering goods. Large scale operations are expected to happen in low altitude airspace in the near future, where many static and dynamic constraints exist. High sensitivity to wind and high maneuverability are unique characteristics of these vehicles, which bring great chal...

On August 2, 2010, a Navy helicopter entered the highly restricted airspace above Washington, D.C. without permission [1]. The event might have passed as unremarkable but for the fact that no-one was piloting the helicopter: as an unmanned aircraft, it carried no humans onboard, and—somehow—the vital communications link to its ground operators had been lost. The 1,429-kilogram MQ-8B Fire Scout ...

Regulatory agencies worldwide are working towards safely integrating unmanned aircraft into their respective national airspaces. Reliability assessment of unmanned aircraft is a key step in the certification process. This thesis presents an analysis framework for the reliability assessment of small unmanned aircraft. Specifically, the effect of the placement of actuators and control surfaces on...

Reliability validation of safety-critical flight control systems requires accurate simulation models of aircraft. This paper proposes a simple approach to validate such models efficiently using flight data. A statistical model validation analysis is shown to be equivalent to a robust control analysis for simple linear systems. The analysis is extended to nonlinear systems in conjunction with Mo...

We provide an overview of ongoing research which targets development of a principled framework for mixed-initiative interaction with unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). UASs are now becoming technologically mature enough to be integrated into civil society. Principled interaction between UASs and human resources is an essential component in their future uses in complex emergency services or blueli...

Unmanned aircraft systems use a variety of techniques to plan collision-free flight paths given a map of obstacles and nofly zones. However, maps are not perfect and obstacles may change over time or be detected during flight, which may invalidate paths that the aircraft is already following. Thus, dynamic in-flight replanning is required. Numerous strategies can be used for replanning, where t...