Optical navigation of unmanned aircraft systems

Unmanned aircraft systems as wingmen

This paper introduces a method to integrate Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) into a highly functional manned/ unmanned team through the design and implementation of 3D distributed formation/flight control algorithms with the goal to act as wingmen for a manned aircraft. The proposed algorithms are designed to increase UAS autonomy, dynamically modify formations, utilize standard operating forma...

Handling Qualities Evaluations of Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Intelligent Management Control for Unmanned Aircraft Navigation and Formation Keeping

The paper presents some aspects that have become critical in the context of guidance, navigation, and control of unmanned aerial vehicles. The envisioned cost-effectiveness of unmanned air vehicles in support of a variety of military and civilian applications has introduced basic and applied research challenges in areas such as levels of autonomy and “intelligence” of the platform, interaction ...

Selected Aspects of Navigation and Path Planning in Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are an important future technology with early generations already being used in many areas of application encompassing both military and civilian domains. This thesis proposes a number of integration techniques for combining control-based navigation with more abstract path planning functionality for UASs. These techniques are empirically tested and validated usi...

Research with Collaborative Unmanned Aircraft Systems

We provide an overview of ongoing research which targets development of a principled framework for mixed-initiative interaction with unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). UASs are now becoming technologically mature enough to be integrated into civil society. Principled interaction between UASs and human resources is an essential component in their future uses in complex emergency services or blueli...