Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are used for many missions, including weather reconnaissance, search and rescue assisting operations over seas and mountains, aerial photographing and mapping, fire detection, and traffic control. Autonomous operation of UAVs requires the development of control systems that can work without human support for long time periods. The path planners, which generate co...

Given the sequence of phases and flight modes that represent the flight plan of a commercial aircraft, the initial and final states, and a set of path constraints, we solve the multi-phase optimal control problem of finding control inputs, switching times between flight modes and the corresponding trajectory of the aircraft that minimizes fuel consumption. The aircraft in flight is modeled as a...

This paper provides an overview oabout the design of the LinkMAV rotary wing autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicle. The paper describes the flying platform, the main problems related to aerodynamics and propulsion, the onboard avionics and the flight control system, including the autonomous navigation algorithms. We also describe the sensor chosen for the MAV05 competition, held in Garmisch Partenkir...

A possible cause for the accident of Ariane 5 in its maiden flight has been associated with the mishandling of an abnormal situation (known as an exception) that had occurred in the embedded software of the launcher.That is, after an exception behaviour was detected, the inappropriate corrective action taken by the software made the vehicle to veer off its flight path leading to the structural ...