Flapping-wing flight is not applicable to huge aircrafts, but has a great potential for micro UAVs as demonstrated by real birds, bats or flying insects. The ROBUR project aims at designing a robotic platform that will serve to better understand the design constraints that this flying mode entails, and to assess its capacity to foster autonomy and adaptation. The article describes the major com...

TNDT (Thermal Non Destructive Testing) is now an emerging method that comes out of laboratory since a few years. It is here proposed to investigate, compare and quantify the different possibilities to use thermography in stead of radiography or ultrasonic testing on composite parts in maintenance of aircrafts. The new idea is to use military thermal imagers because the detector is now a very se...

The design of statistical classification systems for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a cumbersome task. This paper proposes a method using Evolutionary Strategies (ES) to evolve and upgrade the set of parameters in an OCR system. This OCR is applied to identify the tail number of aircrafts moving on the airport. The proposed approach is discussed and some results are obtained using a ben...

Protective coatings are commonly applied to automobiles, aircrafts, ships, railways, furniture, bridges, concretes, architectural constituents, industrial installations, and many other products that we encounter on a daily basis. Coating application in many of these products is primarily implemented to provide protection against harsh environments such as UV light, extreme temperatures, acid, a...

To enable global scale quantum key distribution (QKD), satellite based systems are the most promising approach. So far, free-space QKD has already been demonstrated on communication channels with attenuation comparable to satellite downlinks, and classical laser communications with satellites and aircrafts is heavily explored. Here, combining both these challenges, we demonstrate an aircraft to...

This paper presents an overview of the results of the development of Ku-Band Low-Profile antennas for Mobile Satellite Communications. The antennas are based on a hybrid mechanical-electronic steerable array architecture. Different prototypes have been developed and demonstrated. We present the results for two receive-only antennas for satellite broadcasting applications and two Transmit-Receiv...