We discuss the development, integration, simulation, and flight test of a manned vehicle UAV mission system in a partially-known environment. The full control system allows a manned aircraft to issue mission level commands to an autonomous aircraft in realtime. This system includes a Natural Language (NL) Interface to allow the manned and unmanned vehicle to communicate in languages understood ...

Autonomous contingency management systems, such as a forced landing system which reacts appropriately to an engine failure is important for the safe operation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). This paper details a method to ascertain the reachability of any possible emergency landing site for a forced landing in steady uniform wind conditions. With knowledge of the aircraft’s state, such as s...

New regulatory safety standards will soon require unmanned aircraft systems to meet high levels of reliability. There is potential to increase the reliability of such systems without necessarily increasing the number of hardware components. This paper motivates a mix of physical and analytical redundancy in order to increase the system-level reliability of a small unmanned aircraft. The aircraf...

models: airborne lidar and photogrammetry. The investigation is done in the context of the newly emerging technology of lightweight unmanned aerial systems (UAS). UAS's offer many advantages over manned aircraft

This paper presents a novel Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Avionics Based Integrity Augmentation (ABIA) system architecture suitable for civil and military air platforms, including Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). Taking the move from previous research on high-accuracy Differential GNSS (DGNSS) systems design, integration and experimental flight test activities conducted at the Itali...

In order for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to fly safely into civil airspace, the development of vigorous unmanned aircraft’s Accident Avoidance System (UAS-AAS) is rather crucial. However, accurate localization is a key prerequisite for a UAS-AAS to be successful. This paper investigate the application of two filtering and smoothing techniques to a UAS given the aircraft dynamics, sensor per...

The use of unmanned aircraft in the National Airspace System (NAS) has been characterized as the next great step forward in the evolution of civil aviation. Although use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in military and public service operations is proliferating, civil use of UAS remains limited in the United States today. This report focuses on one particular regulatory challenge: classifying...

This study evaluates a traffic management concept designed to enable simultaneous operations of multiple small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in the U.S. national airspace system (NAS). A five-day flight-test activity is described that examined the feasibility of operating multiple UAS beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) of their respective operators in the same airspace. Over the five-day cam...

In the near future, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) usage will expand into the Naval aircraft carrier operating environment. The new and different capabilities of these vehicles will likely introduce numerous potential changes in the nature of deck operations. The presence of UAVs and wireless data communications will enable centralized planning and control of la...

This study investigated three different types of multispectral imaging systems for airborne remote sensing to support management in agricultural application and production. The three systems have been used in agricultural studies. They range from low-cost to relatively high-cost, manually operated to automated, multispectral composite imaging with a single camera and integrated imaging with cus...