Landing is a challenging flight phase for automatic control of fixed-wing aircraft. For unmanned air vehicles in particular, it is imperative that model uncertainty be considered in the control synthesis. These vehicles tend to have limited sensors and instrumentation, yet must achieve good performance in the presence of modelling errors and exogenous inputs such as turbulence. Quantitative Fee...

Although landing in a plantarflexion and inversion position is a well-known characteristic of lateral ankle sprains, the associated kinematics of the knee and hip is largely unknown. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the changes in knee and hip kinematics during landings on an altered landing surface of combined plantarflexion and inversion. Participants performed five drop la...

Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have seen enormous growth in recent years due to the advances in related scientific and technological fields. This fact combined with decreasing costs of using UAVs enables their use in new application areas. Many of these areas are suitable for miniature scale UAVs Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) which have the added advantage of portability and ease of deployment. One...

“Keep your eye on the ball,” is an old sports adage. This is especially true in sports like volleyball, tennis, American football, and basketball. Among these sports, basketball is one of the few sports where airborne athletes cannot visually reestablish their relationship to the ground because they are focused on the ball. This typically happens when athletes are attempting to rebound a missed...

Flight test results and lessons learned are presented for a helicopter UAV low-altitude navigation and landing system. Results are given for both urban and natural settings. The navigation component uses a quasi-3D A* approach to route planning that enables maneuver through complex terrain using real-time sensor data. The landing component performs landings to sites that it determines to be saf...

Future Madplanets explorations call forp recision and even pinpoint landing. Low cost optical correlatori s one of the promising enabling technologies for pinpoint landing. JPL has developed a state-of-the-art miniature optical correlator (MOC) to demonstrate its feasibility. In this paper, we describe a simulation testbed underd evelopment for measuring MOC’s perfonnance in a high-fidelity ent...

A long landing is one type of flight incident that will multiply the risk of a runway excursion. It occurs frequently but receives little attention in research due to difficulty in obtaining the real flight data. The aim of this paper is to discover key flight parameter features of long landing incidents by analyzing Quick Access Recorder (QAR) data and put forward prevention measures from the ...

BACKGROUND A common knee injury mechanism sustained during basketball is landing badly from a jump. Landing is a complex task and requires good coordination, dynamic muscle control and flexibility. For adolescents whose coordination and motor control has not fully matured, landing badly from a jump can present a significant risk for injury. There is currently limited biomechanical information r...

EIREN K. JACOBSON, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0208, U.S.A.; KARIN A. FORNEY, Marine Mammal and Turtle Divison, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 110 Shaffer Road, Santa Cruz, California 95060, U.S.A.; JAMES T. HARVEY, ...