Demonstrating the reliability of flight control algorithms is critical to integrating unmanned aircraft systems into the civilian airspace. For many potential applications, design and certification of these algorithms will rely heavily on mathematical models of the aircraft dynamics. Therefore, the aerospace community must develop flight test platforms to support the advancement of model-based ...

The use of unmanned aircraft for civil applications is expected to increase over the next decade, particularly in so-called “dull, dirty and dangerous” missions. Unmanned aircraft will undoubtedly require some form of autonomy in order to ensure safe operations for all airspace users. However, in order to be used for civil applications, unmanned aircraft must gain regulatory approval in a proce...

Unmanned aircraft systems are gaining popularity in commercial and government applications. This, however, makes these systems susceptible to security attacks. This paper overviews some of the security considerations in unmanned aircraft systems and details an encryption protocol implementation. Because encryption can be very expensive in computational resources and battery consumption, an effi...

Introduction Unmanned air systems (UAS) have been growing in popularity during the past 10 to 15 years. In 2001 the Pentagon had less than 50 unmanned aircraft and by 2012 had over 7,500 [1]. The Department of Defense has also shown more interest in unmanned aircraft by providing $6.0 billion in 2011 [2, 3]. UAS technology has not been growing within the United States territory as quickly due t...

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...

This paper introduces a method to integrate Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) into a highly functional manned/ unmanned team through the design and implementation of 3D distributed formation/flight control algorithms with the goal to act as wingmen for a manned aircraft. The proposed algorithms are designed to increase UAS autonomy, dynamically modify formations, utilize standard operating forma...

This paper presents a net-centric communication, command, and control architecture for a heterogeneous unmanned aircraft system comprised of small and miniature unmanned aircraft. An integrated system was developed using a bottomup design approach to reflect and enhance the interplay between networked communication and autonomous aircraft coordination. The advantages of the approach are demonst...

A significant obstacle to the integration of unmanned aircraft (UA) into the National Airspace System (NAS) is the requirement that they incorporate a system (or systems) that reduces the risk of midair collision to a level equivalent to, or lower than, that posed by operations of manned aircraft. As no on-board system presently exists, and the likelihood of such a system being developed and ce...

The integration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the airspace system is a key challenge facing air traffic management today. An important aspect of this challenge is how to determine and manage 4-dimensional trajectories for both manned and unmanned aircraft, and how to appropriately allocate resources among different aircraft. An integrated approach requires solving the traditional Air ...