Civil unmanned aircraft will need to meet stringent safety standards before they are certified to operate in the national airspace of the United States. Reliability is a key requirement for certification. Most current civil unmanned aircraft are not reliable because of the presence of single points-of-failure and the use of low-reliability components. For example: Many fixed-wing unmanned aircr...

Registration of unmanned aircraft is a common policy around the world and forms part International Civil Aviation Organisation’s model regulations for aircraft. This study conducts review various registration policies that have been implemented amongst advanced economies to find commonalities differences. New Zealand then used as case study. The country does not currently aircraft; however, the...

This paper explores low observability flight path planning of unmanned air vehicles (UAV’s) in the presence of radar detection systems. The probability of detection model of an aircraft near an enemy radar depends on aircraft attitude, range, and configuration. A detection model is coupled with a simplified aircraft dynamics model. The Nonlinear Trajectory Generation (NTG) software package deve...

We approach dynamic collision avoidance problem from the perspective of designing collision avoidance systems for unmanned aerial vehicles. Before unmanned aircraft can fly safely in civil airspace, robust airborne collision avoidance systems must be developed. Instead of hand-crafting a collision avoidance algorithm for every combination of sensor and aircraft configurations, we investigate au...

Under DSTO’s Strategic Research Initiative on Signatures, Materials, and Energy, a project entitled “Hybrid-Propulsion and Power-Management Technologies for Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)” is underway. Fuel cells have been identified as having the potential to substantially increase the range and endurance of small, electrically-powered fixed-wing aircraft. Herein described are experi...

Unmanned aircraft (UA) applications impose a variety of computing tasks on the on-board computer system. From a research perspective, it is often more convenient to evaluate algorithms on bigger aircraft as they are capable of lifting heavier loads and thus more powerful computational units. On the other hand, smaller systems are often less expensive and operation is less restricted in many cou...