Although the walnut husk fly, Rhagoletis completa, is sometimes considered to be a weak flier, very little is known about the actual flight capacity of this fly. With funding from CDFA and CSU-ARI (California State University Agricultural Research Initiative), we initiated studies, in the laboratory and field, of flight capacity and dispersal ability of husk flies. Adult flies in the laboratory...

An Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) is an uninhabited airplane, piloted by embedded avionics and supervised by an operator on ground. Unmanned Aerial Systems were designed to operate in dangerous situations, like military missions. With the avionics technological evolution, Unmanned Aerial Systems also become a valid option for commercial applications, specially for dull and tedious surveillance ap...

Unmanned aircraft are expected to increase in use in civil applications over the coming years, particularly for the so-called dull, dirty and dangerous missions. Unmanned aircraft will undoubtedly require some form of autonomy in order to ensure safe operations: communications failure could render a completely human-piloted unmanned aircraft dangerous to other airspace users. In order to be use...

Unmanned Areial Vehicles(UAV)can be automatically landed on airbag using Vision based algorithm. This paper proposes a review on the novel algorithm based on the color and shape detection of airbag. Colorand shape-based detection vision algorithms are applied for robust detection under varying lighting conditions.It discuss about the various landing techniques used for aircrafts and Unmanned Ae...

Since 1980 the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has been involved in the design and manufacture of eleven aircraft, manned and unmanned. Recently the focus has been on light unmanned research platforms to assist a number of tertiary academic institutes with research into UAS related technologies. While there is a relatively strong focus on the control and navigation aspects...

We present in this paper an integration scheme of a low-cost inertial attitude and position reference system for a mini unmanned helicopter by utilizing the robust and H1 filtering technique. The result has been successfully implemented and tested on our mini-scale unmanned helicopter. Simulation and flight experiment results show that the proposed technique is very effective in real-time and s...

The viability of Unmanned Systems as tools is increasingly recognized in many domains. As technology advances, the autonomy on board these systems also advances. In order to evaluate the systems in terms of their levels of autonomy, it is critical to have a set of standard definitions that support a set of metrics. As autonomy cannot be evaluated quantitatively without sound and thorough techni...

Manually landing an unmanned aerial vehicle presents unique challenges since unmanned vehicle pilots require extensive training to become proficient in the landing task. Operators must therefore choose between a pilot controlling the vehicle from a ground station, or procurement of an automatic landing system. Although several autoland controllers exist for small or micro unmanned vehicles and ...

Unmanned vehicles (air-, ground-, and sea-based), or mobile robots, have become increasingly important for both civilian and military applications and both intelligence and autonomy are important for these vehicles and their continued success. Many of these vehicles, however, currently require significant human supervision. For example, the Predator and GlobalHawk are essentially remotely pilot...