unmanned aerial Vehicles : an Overview

j a n u a r y / f e b r u a r y 2 0 0 8 www.insidegnss.com Once we tried to Google “UAV” and got more than two million citations on the Internet. Try to find the definition of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and you’ll uncover a welter of choices in the literature. So, let’s just say that a UAV is an aerial vehicle capable of sustained f light without the need for a human operator onboard. Although unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are mostly used in military applications nowadays, the UAVs can also perform such scientific, public safety, and commercial tasks as data and image acquisition of disaster areas, map building, communication relays, search and rescue, traffic surveillance, and so on. A UAV can be remotely controlled, semi-autonomous, autonomous, or a combination of these, capable of performing as many tasks as you can imagine, including saving your life. Nowadays, UAVs perform a variety of tasks in both military and civil/commercial markets. Indeed, many different types of UAVs exist with different capabilities responding to different user needs. The purpose of this column is to give the reader an overview of the large number of existing UAV systems and R&D projects as well as the practical challenges facing UAV designers and applications.