The paper reports on an investigation made at Fraunhofer IZFP where a rotary wing octocopter micro air vehicle (MAV) system has been used to scan buildings for inspection and monitoring purpose with a high resolution digital camera. The MAV has been equipped with a microcontroller-based flight control system and different sensors for navigation and flight stabilization. Pictures have been taken...

Executive Summary Human error will pose a threat to the operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), just as it does in other fields of aviation. If UAVs are to be permitted to operate in the National Airspace System (NAS), it will be necessary to understand the human factors associated with these vehicles. Rather than eliminating the potential for human error, the removal of the on-board pilo...

Collaborative robotic systems, such as unmanned aircraft systems, are becoming technologically mature enough to be integrated into civil society. To gain practical use and acceptance, a verifiable, principled and well-defined foundation for interactions between human operators and autonomous systems is needed. In this paper, we propose and specify such a formally grounded collaboration framewor...

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) become indispensable parts of modern airpower as force multiplier. One of the main advantages of UAS is long endurance. UAS have to take extra payloads to accomplish different missions but these payloads decrease endurance of aircraft because of increasing drag. There are continuing researches to increase the capability of UAS. There are some vertical thermal air...

The verification and validation (V&V) and certification problems for avionics systems in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have been regarded as great challenges in realizing routine UAS into the National Air Space (NAS). Whereas current-day emerging avionics systems, such as embedded autopilots in UAS, are geared towards more autonomous operations, the currently employed V&V techniques in the in...

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Future small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) will require careful co-design over both physical and cyber elements to maximize total-system efficiency. Mission objectives and success of the system as a whole are becoming increasingly dependent on appropriate allocation of computational resources balanced against demands of the physical actuation systems. In this paper we describe a co-optimizati...

The Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) community in the United States has identified the need for a “collision avoidance region” in which UAS Detect-and-Avoid (DAA) vertical guidance is restricted to preclude interoperability issues with manned aircraft collision avoidance system vertical resolution advisories (RAs). This paper documents the process by which the collision avoidance region was defi...

This paper addresses the opportunities and challenges involved in applying natural language processing techniques to the control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The problem of controlling an unmanned aircraft via natural language inputs is formulated as a feedback control problem. Two implementations of such systems are described. The phraseology of the existing air traffic control language...