Aerial robots can be considered as the natural evolution of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) from the point of view of the intelligence. Traditional industrial robots evolved from the repetition of sequences of previously defined way points, with minimal perception and decision capabilities, toward robots interacting with the environment, mapping unknown environments and localising the robot...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are gaining more and more attention during the last few years due to their important contributions and cost-effective applications in several tasks such as surveillance, search and rescue missions, geographic studies, as well as various military and security applications. Due to the requirements of autonomous flight under different flight conditions without a pil...

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) comprising a large number of sensing nodes deployed within the area of interest, are able to measure, process and share specific parameters. Besides enabling effective area coverage, recent research has proven that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent a viable addition to large area monitoring through remote sensing and data collecting functions. The propose...

This paper discusses several unique hardware testbeds that were developed to evaluate coordination and control algorithms for missions with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The first testbed uses eight rovers and two blimps operated indoors to emulate a heterogeneous fleet of aircraft. The second testbed has eight UAVs flown autonomously with commercial autopilots, which are also used ...

Mission Planning software uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) sources and dynamic aggregation of geo-referenced data to provide an information-rich context for human-directed creation of missions that are, for the most part, vehicle-independent. This requires a connection between the universal Mission Planner and an heterogeneous groups of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), payloads and ass...

This paper presents the architecture developed in the framework of the AWARE project for the autonomous distributed cooperation between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), wireless sensor/actuator networks and ground camera networks. One of the main goals was the demonstration of useful actuation capabilities involving multiple ground and aerial robots in the context of civil applications. A novel...

Advances in control engineering and material science made it possible to develop small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with cameras and sensors. These UAVs enable us to obtain a bird’s eye view of the environment. Having access to an aerial view over large areas is helpful in disaster situations, where often only incomplete and inconsistent information is available to the rescue ...

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...

In many military and civilian applications, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide an indispensable platform for gathering information about the situation on the ground. In particular, they have the potential to revolutionize the way in which information is collected, fused and disseminated. These advantages are greatly enhanced if swarms of multiple UAVs are used, since this enables the colle...