Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can navigate with low risk in obstacle-free environments using ground control stations that plan a series of GPS waypoints as a path to follow. This GPS waypoint navigation does however become dangerous in environments where the GPS signal is faulty or is only present in some places and when the airspace is filled with obstacles. UAV navigation then becomes challe...

Three dimensional data is in great demand for disaster and environmental monitoring. In order to represent 3D space in details, it is indispensable to acquire 3D shape and texture together efficiently. However, they still lack a reliable, quick, cheap and handy method of acquiring three dimensional data of objects at higher resolution and accuracy in outdoors and moving environments. In this re...

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the wireless camera component, communications, and control components for a gun-launched, transformable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The transformable UAV is designed to be able to detect standard targets. In addition, the transformable UAV can be converted from a gun-launched projectile transformed to a UAV, and bevisually guided to ...

Quad-rotor helicopter is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), whose lift is generated by four rotors located on the corner of X-shape. Due to simplicity of its dynamics and its ability to hover, quadrotor helicopter becomes as a popular platform for UAV. Current designs mostly consider a linear model for controller design. In this paper, we derivate nonlinear dynamic equations of the quadrotor UAV...

Digital terrain models are invaluable datasets that are frequently used for visualizing, modeling, and analyzing Earth surface processes. Accurate models covering local scale landscape features are often very expensive and have poor temporal resolution. This research investigates the utility of UAV acquired imagery for generating high resolution terrain models and provides a detailed accuracy a...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent a new frontier in environmental research. Their use has the potential to revolutionise the field if they prove capable of improving data quality or the ease with which data are collected beyond traditional methods. We apply UAV technology to wildlife monitoring in tropical and polar environments and demonstrate that UAV-derived counts of colony nesting ...

An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is controlled by an embedded system that works autonomously by following commands stored in an internal computer. An UAV contains elements that may vary according to the domain application. Thus, such elements might be managed by the Software Product Line (PL) approach. UAVs and PLs use different tools for managing their specifications and models. Therefore, thi...

As an important way to obtain the high-resolution remote sensing images, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aviation remote sensing plays a more and more important role in the area of photogrammetry and remote sensing application. The correction of the UAV remote sensing images without the ground control points needs high-resolution attitude data. The original attitude data can be obtained from ...

We determine the efficiency of a delivery system in which an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or a fleet of UAVs, provides service to customers while making return trips to a truck that is itself moving. In other words, a UAV picks up a package from the truck (which continues on its route), and after delivering the package, the UAV returns to the truck to pick up the next package. Although the ha...

ABSTRACT Small UAV performance is limited by the sensors and software filters used in the navigational systems. Several solutions of various complexity and cost exist, however no ready-made solutions exist for a high-accuracy, low-cost UAV system. Presented is the design (low-level system as well as high-level extended Kalman filter) for a specifically designed small-UAV navigation platform, Ag...