Planning and decision making, especially the planning of dynamically negotiable collision free paths, is an integral part in the operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Effective path planning ensures that the UAV operates safely, and conforms to the rules and regulations governing flight within the National Airspace System (NAS). To demonstrate an Equivalent Level Of Safety (ELOS) to tha...

Dynamic soaring is a technique used the sea bird the Albatross. This technique allows for the bird to stay in the air for extended periods of time with very little effort. Dynamic soaring utilizes the wind gradient on the surface of the ocean to maintain its airspeed. A similar technique is used by RC glider pilots to achieve high speeds by using the shear wind layer on the leeward side of moun...

This paper presents a study of a minimum time-to-climb trajectory analysis for aircraft flying in a twodimensional altitude dependent wind field. The time optimal control problem possesses a singular control structure when the lift coefficient is taken as a control variable. A singular arc analysis is performed to obtain an optimal control solution on the singular arc. Using a time-scale separa...

We determine the solution of the fractional spatial diffusion equation in n-dimensional Euclidean space for a “free” particle by computing the corresponding propagator. We employ both the Hamiltonian and Lagrangian approaches which produce exact results for the case of jumps governed by symmetric stable Lévy flights.

The flying ad-hoc networks (FANET) are utilized in the various types of applications, such as weather, military, information retrieval, geographic information systems (GIS), surveillance of disaster hit area, etc. The groups of unmanned aerial vehicles, also called flying nodes or crafts, are used for such applications. The flying nodes or crafts, when take the flight, need to consider multiple...

Real world routing problems, e.g., in the airline industry or in public and rail transit, can feature complex non-linear cost functions. An important case are costs for crossing regions, such as countries or fare zones. We introduce the shortest path problem with crossing costs (SPPCC) to address such situations; it generalizes the classical shortest path problem and variants such as the resour...

As invisibility cloaking has recently become experimental reality, it is interesting to explore ways to reveal remaining imperfections. In essence, the idea of most invisibility cloaks is to recover the optical path lengths without an object (to be made invisible) by a suitable arrangement around that object. Optical path length is proportional to the time of flight of a light ray or to the opt...

The obstacle avoidance system of a drone affects the quality its flight path. artificial potential field method can react quickly when facing obstacles; however, traditional lacks consideration position information between drones and obstacles during flight, issues including local minima, unreachable targets, unreasonable techniques that lengthen times consume more energy get encountered. There...

A new set of higher-order analytic solutions is introduced for the critical cases of: (a) ballistic skip trajectories with initial speed greater than the circular orbital speed (supercircular case); (b) shallow ballistic entry with entry speed less than the circular orbital speed (subcircular case); and (c) shallow ballistic entry from low circular orbits (circular case). Both non-circular case...

This work demonstrates a successful evolutionary framework to generate the neural network controller of a physically simulated simple 3D flapping wing flying robot which shows robust flight manoeuvre and tolerance to external perturbations. In contrast to recent studies which dealt with the artificial evolution of neural network for steering flight [1,2], this work generates a robot which uses ...