Autonomous rotorcrafts are required to operate in cluttered, unknown, and unstructured environments. Guaranteeing the safety of these systems is critical for their successful deployment. Current methodologies for evaluating or ensuring safety either do not guarantee safety or severely limit the performance of the rotorcrafts. Autonomous vehicles need to operate at their limits to effectively co...

The use of robotic systems, especially multi-rotor aerial vehicles, in the documentation historical buildings and cultural heritage monuments has become common recent years. However, teleoperated systems have significant limitations encouraging ongoing development autonomous unmanned vehicles (UAVs). platforms provide a more accurate safe measurement distant difficult to access areas than their...

Localization in a global map is critical to success in many autonomous robot missions. This is particularly challenging for multi-robot operations in unknown and adverse environments. Here, we are concerned with providing a small unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) the ability to localize itself within a 2.5D aerial map generated from imagery captured by a low-flying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). We...

While there is currently significant interest in developing Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) that can be supervised by a single operator, the majority of these systems focus on Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) domains. One domain that has received significantly less attention is the use of multiple UASs to insert or extract supplies or people. To this end, MAVIES (Multi-Autono...

Contingency Management—the problem of recognizing, assessing, and responding to unanticipated events or conditions that impact plan execution—is a key enabler for unmanned systems to become autonomous systems—that is, able to carry out assigned tasks or missions without continuous human supervision. We present a concept and technology for holistic contingency management that addresses all level...

Autonomous control of UAVs has become a popular research topic in recent years. This paper is concerned with the flight of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and proposes fuzzy logic based autonomous flight and landing system controllers. Three fuzzy logic modules are developed under the main navigation control system and three more for the autonomous landing control system to control of the altit...

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the powerful impact of an innovative intelligent autonomous mission planner/controller for networked multiple manned/unmanned autonomous vehicles which is applicable to the Future Combat System (FCS), Future Force Warrior (FFW), Future Special Operations Forces (SOF) systems, Land Warrior, and Homeland Defense. For the intelligent vehicles, which co...