Despite the name Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), humans are integral to UAV operations. Since the UAV’s operator interface is the primary facilitator of human-vehicle communication and coordination, an effectively designed interface is critical for successful UAV operations. To design an effective interface, it is essential to first determine the information needs for both the human and UAV comp...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are an emerging technology with the potential to revolutionize commercial industries and the public domain outside of the military. UAVs would be able to speed up rescue and recovery operations from natural disasters and can be used for autonomous delivery systems (e.g., Amazon Prime Air). An increase in the number of active UAV systems in dense urban areas is at...

The development and final system architecture of the Missouri S&T AESS UAV Team UAV is described. The project follows the guidelines for the 2008 UAV Challenge – Outback Rescue which is an international aerospace competition held in Kingaroy, Australia. The design of the electrical subsystems and the overall architecture of the UAV is described. The selected systems are integrated into a standa...

Distributed electronic propulsion (DEP) aircraft with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) ability mostly equipped multiple redundant tiltable propulsors, which are used to provide not only thrusts, but also control torque in all flight mode. The features make the allocation problem of these both complex important. Therefore, this paper proposes: (?) a prototype platform for DEP VTOL that allow...

Using base stations mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV-BSs) is a promising new evolution of wireless networks for the provision of on-demand high data rates. While many studies have explored deploying UAV-BSs in a green field —no existence of terrestrial BSs (T-BSs), this paper focuses on the deployment of UAV-BSs in the presence of a terrestrial network. The purpose of this article is ...

In recent years there has been increased interest in the development of lightweight rotor-based UAV platforms which may be deployed as single or multiple autonomous UAV systems in support of applications such as ground surveillance, search and rescue, environmental monitoring in remote areas, bridge inspection and aerial imaging of crops. With the increased complexity of the UAV platforms comes...

Consider a finite set of targets, with each target assigned a relative deadline, and each pair of targets assigned a fixed transit flight time. Given a flock of identical UAVs, can one ensure that every target is repeatedly visited by some UAV at intervals of duration at most the target’s relative deadline? TheCyclic-Routing UAV Problem (cr-uav) is the question of whether this task has a soluti...

This paper provides new results for the tracking control of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The dynamics of the quadrotor UAV are expressed globally on the configuration manifold of the special Euclidean group, and we construct geometric controllers to track outputs that correspond to each of three flight modes, namely (1) almost global asymptotic tracking of the attitude of the quad...

Since late 90’s of the last century, rapid advances in technology, mechanical engineering, miniaturization, telecommunications and informatics enabled development and routine deployment of sophisticated robots in many real world domains. Besides many applications in assembly industry, e.g., in car, or electronics assembly lines, defense organizations, together with space exploration and mining ...

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) industry has been rapidly growing over the last decade. New UAV are being developed for military applications and also for civil usage. There is a strong correlation between the mission of a UAV and the avionics necessary to implement it. For this reason, the design, development and verification of UAV avionics, including hardware and software architecture, hav...