One challenge facing coordination and deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) today is the amount of human involvement needed to carry out a successful mission. Currently, control and coordination of UAVs typically involves multiple operators to control a single agent. The aim of this paper is to invert this relationship, enabling a single pilot to control and coordinate a group of UAVs. ...

We have attached ACT-R to the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL’s) Uninhabited Air Vehicle (UAV) Synthetic Task Environment (STE). The UAV STE is a high fidelity simulation of the Predator RQ1A UAV with built in basic maneuvering, landing, and reconnaissance tasks and data collection capabilities. The UAV STE’s design and capabilities are described in detail in Schreiber, Lyon, Martin, and ...

This paper introduces our robotic system named UGAV (Unmanned Ground-Air Vehicle) consisting of two semi-autonomous robot platforms, an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The paper focuses on three topics of the inspection with the combined UGV and UAV: (A) teleoperated control by means of cell or smart phones with a new concept of automatic configuration of th...

The main advantage of tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are introduced. Three design solutions of rotor tailsitter lift system of UAV have been presented and the respective control strategies and characteristics of three solutions are also analyzed in the paper, through the related experiments the design of twin-rotor lift system is verified, and its feasibility is proved. The character...

Field trial is very critical and high risk in autonomous UAV development life cycle. Hardware in the loop (HIL) simulation is a computer simulation that has the ability to simulate UAV flight characteristic, sensor modeling and actuator modeling while communicating in real time with the UAV autopilot hardware. HIL simulation can be used to test the UAV autopilot hardware reliability, test the c...

Equipping a fixed wing unmanned air vehicle (UAV) with low-level autopilots, we derive high-level velocity and roll angle control laws for the UAV. Backstepping techniques are applied to design the velocity and roll angle control laws from known velocity and heading angle control laws that explicitly account for velocity and heading rate constraints of the UAV. Regarding unknown autopilot const...

This project is an artificially intelligent navigation system for use on board unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The system takes the available input data and a user-defined mission statement, integrates the data, and produces navigation reference signals that are used by other systems to control the plane. Figure 1 shows the UAV navigation system block diagram, which is implemented in an Altera...

A complex electrical engineering project, Dronenet, is a design and system integration of four major subsystems: an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a control terminal for the UAV, a mobile UAV carrier, and a control terminal for the mobile UAV carrier. Dronenet has a unique regenerative charging system based on the design of a Bedini motor to extend the duration of Pb and LiPo batteries. This pr...

Spectral reflectance data originating from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery is a valuable tool to monitor plant nutrition, reduce nitrogen (N) application to real needs, thus producing both economic and environmental benefits. The objectives of the trial were i) to compare the spectral reflectance of 3 turfgrasses acquired via UAV and by a ground-based instrument; ii) to test the sensitivi...

Laser power has become a viable solution to provide convenient and sustainable energy supply to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this paper, we study a laser-powered UAV wireless communication system, where a laser transmitter sends laser beams to charge a fixed-wing UAV in flight, and the UAV uses the harvested laser energy to communicate with a ground station. To maintain the UAV’s sustain...