When using a team of small unmanned aircraft, with no satellite communications, the operational range of the team is typically limited by line-of-sight communication constraints between an individual aircraft and a ground station, and not the endurance range of the individual aircraft within the team. By using electronic chaining to form a multi-hop communication link using the team, the overal...

This paper focuses on the design of an integrated navigation and guidance system for unmanned helicopters. The integrated navigation system comprises two systems: the Flight Path Planning System (FPPS) and the Flight Control System (FCS). The FPPS finds the shortest flight path by the A-Star (A*) algorithm in an adaptive manner for different flight conditions, and the FPPS can add a forbidden z...

To collect the information on devastated districts, it is effective to use helicopters. However, the operation using manned helicopters costs a lot. It is expected that the use of unmanned helicopters could reduce the cost of these tasks. It is known to be more difficult to operate unmanned helicopters remotely than to operate manned helicopters. The reason is that an operator cannot know the a...

Recent studies have shown that with appropriate operator decision support and with sufficient automation, inverting the multiple operators to single-unmanned vehicle control paradigm is possible. These studies, however, have generally focused on homogeneous teams of vehicles, and have not completely addressed either the manifestation of heterogeneity in vehicle teams, or the effects of heteroge...

Civil unmanned aircraft will need to meet stringent safety standards before they are certified to operate in the national airspace of the United States. Reliability is a key requirement for certification. Most current civil unmanned aircraft are not reliable because of the presence of single points-of-failure and the use of low-reliability components. For example: Many fixed-wing unmanned aircr...

Military forces of the future will use mixed manned and unmanned forces for a broad variety of functions. Measurement of overall effectiveness in these mixed initiative systems will be essential in order to achieve optimal system performance levels. Behavioral measures of both human and unmanned performance obtained in system simulations or in live exercises will be used to continuously diagnos...

Unmanned Avionics Systems (UAS) are real-time critical embedded systems that include high-integrity requirements. Most of these systems need to be certified before use, particularly in civil airspace. To reduce development cost, some UAS software is developed as part of a Software Product Line (SPL). A product-line comprises a reference architecture and a set of reusable core assets. New system...

Several recent studies have addressed the possible impact of using highly autonomous platforms to invert today’s multiple-operators-per-single-unmanned-vehicle control paradigm. These studies, however, have generally focused on homogeneous vehicle teams and have not addressed the potential effects of vehicle, capability, or mission type heterogeneity on operator control capacity. Important impl...

Recent advancements in small unmanned vehicles and their capability in collecting dynamic data using onboard sensors make them key players in a wide variety of applications such as mapping, monitoring, search, and rescue. Specifically, monitoring in the border environments using unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) is the focus of this research work. In this regard, ...

Test facility is essential for most of engineering research activities, from modeling and identification to verification of algorithms/methods and final demonstration. It is well known that flight tests for aerospace vehicles are expensive and quite risky. To overcome this, this paper describes a rapid prototyping platform for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) developed at Loughborough ...