Landing gear is one of the critical subsystems of an aircraft. The need to design landing gear with minimum weight, minimum volume, high performance, improved life, and reduced life cycle cost have posed many challenges to landing gear designers and practitioners. Further, it is essential to reduce the landing gear design and development cycle time while meeting all the regulatory and safety re...

During search and rescue operations in case of man-made or natural disasters the application forces need exact information about the situation as soon as possible. At the Fraunhofer IOSB a security and supervision system is developed which uses varied modern sensor systems for this purpose. Beside land robots, maritime vessels, sensor networks and fixed cameras also miniature flight drones are ...

We describe our work on multirotor UAVs and focus on our method for autonomous landing. The paper describes the design of our landing pad and its advantages. We explain how the landing pad detection algorithm works and how the 3D-position of the UAV relative to the landing pad is calculated. Practical experiments prove the quality of these estimations.

A three-dimensional phenomenological model was developed to describe the collective landing of bird flocks. The employed individual based model included the landscape (as an external field) and a continuous internal variable G, to characterize the landing intent of the birds. The birds' interaction with the landscape was coupled adaptively to their landing intent. During the flight, a sharp cro...

Hazard Avoidance is a key technology for a safe landing of future planetary missions. During Hazard Avoidance, sensors and computers onboard the lander are used to detect hazards in the landing zone, autonomously select the most suitable region for landing, and generate the trajectory that retargets the lander to the safer landing site. In this paper, visionbased hazard avoidance algorithms are...