Latent Problem Solving Analysis is applied to model the decision processes of expert instructors judging professional pilots’ landing technique in a B747 flying simulator, showing that that a memory-based model can do well in the absence of more conscious, logical processes.

Despite the interest in formation flying and cubesats over something like the last decade or so, close controlled formation flying of two cubesat size spacecraft has not been achieved. Similarly, despite the growing interest in propulsion systems for cubesats, there are very few commercially available and flight ready systems. If these are coupled with the realization that formation flying coul...

In this study a conflict resolution technique based on danger and concession considerations is presented for free flight paradigm. A danger function which assigns a danger value for the conflict situation, and a concession function which assigns a concession value for the path followed by the aircraft are constructed. The danger and concession values are input to a fuzzy decision module. This m...

The first flight test phase of the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center Autonomous Formation Flight project has successfully demonstrated precision autonomous station-keeping of an F/A-18 research airplane with a second F/A-18 airplane. Blended inertial navigation system (INS) and global positioning system (GPS) measurements have been communicated across an air-to-air telemetry link and used to c...

Formation flight is the primary movement technique for teams of helicopters. However, the potential for accidents is greatly increased when helicopter teams are required to fly in tight formations and under harsh conditions. The starting point for safe autonomous flight formations is to design a distributed control law attenuating external disturbances coming into a formation, so that each vehi...

This paper presents a method for formation flight and collision avoidance of multiple UAVs. Due to the shortcomings such as collision avoidance caused by UAV's high-speed and unstructured environments, this paper proposes a modified tentacle algorithm to ensure the high performance of collision avoidance. Different from the conventional tentacle algorithm which uses inverse derivation, the modi...