This paper discusses the development and testing of a unique testbed consisting of a fleet of eight autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that was designed as a platform for evaluating autonomous coordination and control algorithms. Future UAV teams will have to autonomously demonstrate cooperative behaviors in dynamic and uncertain environments, and this testbed can be used to compare var...

An integrated approach is outlined in this paper to evaluate risks posed by operating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the National Airspace System. The approach supports the systematic evaluation of potential risk mitigation measures recognizing key issues in creation of regulatory and safety policy, including public perception and UAV market forces. Risk mitigation measures are examined for two ex...

To view the full product, including the scope and methodology, click on the link above. Current UAV operations have achieved mission successes, but some challenges are emerging. Among the successes, the Predator UAV has performed traditional intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions and less traditional close air support and armed strike missions. In addition, certain small UAVs h...

This paper presents and overview of the basic and applied research carried out by the Computer Vision Laboratory, Linköping University, in the WITAS UAV Project. This work includes customizing and redesigning vision methods to fit the particular needs and restrictions imposed by the UAV platform, e.g., for low-level vision, motion estimation, navigation, and tracking. It also includes a new lea...

Military services have an active interest in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for applications including surveillance and unmanned combat. In the future, UAV swarms will be able to gather intelligence cooperatively without human intervention. Since the physical employment of UAV swarm technology is not yet economical, simulation is often used to explore their design. This paper discus...

An architecture implemented for intermixed planning and execution of an observation mission for an UAV is described. The mission and its constraints are reported. The ProCoSA tool used to specify the UAV desired behaviour through Petri nets is presented. A planning sub-system optimises the 2D itinerary and the 3D associated trajectories while a guidance sub-system computes the controls sent to ...

In this paper, two techniques to control UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), based on visual information are presented. The first one is based on the detection and tracking of planar structures from an on-board camera, while the second one is based on the detection and 3D reconstruction of the position of the UAV based on an external camera system. Both strategies are tested with a VTOL (Vertical ...

This software provides functions on processing UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) aerial image data according to the requirements of forestry area application on UAV platform. It gives a real-time and remote watch on fire in Greater Xing’ an Mountains, simultaneously the UAV is flying and getting the aerial data, helping users quickly master the number and location of fire points. Monitoring softwar...

For a fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with a gimbaled camera, we consider the problem of tracking a visual target while simultaneously bringing the UAV to orbit on a circular trajectory centered above the target. To achieve this kind of loitering behavior, we propose a feedback control method that is inspired by image-based visual servoing and makes use of a backstepping techn...

We formally define the aerial scanning problem. A set of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cooperate to frequently scan a given geographic area. Each UAV can only photograph a small portion of it at a time. Each UAV maintains the necessary information to create a global picture of the geographic area. This global picture consists of smaller pictures that are taken within small time of each other ...