The use of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) in remote sensing works is becoming a reality. In forest fire scenarios we propose the use of UAS for semi-real-time hot spot detection. In this paper we present Sky-Eye, a rotorcraft prototype designed to provide significant advantages in terms of flexibility, precision, cost, and safety. Sky-Eye is specifically designed for Mediterranean forest fires,...

Abstract: Increasingly aircraft are being designed to be more environmentally friendly and fuel efficient, as defined by the 2020-Vision and Flight-Path EU initiatives. This entails a reduction in aircraft weight while still maintaining all the other constraints. The conventional, semi-monocoque, aircraft design has not changed for the past 50 years. Recently, developments in aircraft design ha...

An analysis was conducted to examine the market visibility of small aircraft as a transportation mode in competition with automobile and scheduled commercial air travel by estimating the pool of users that would potentially switch on-demand air travel due to cost/time saving. These new aircraft greatly increase the practicality of regional aircraft as a transportation mode that can avoid the co...

The present paper deals with the preliminary design of a general aviation Commuter 11 seat aircraft. The Commuter aircraft market is today characterized by very few new models and the majority of aircraft in operation belonging to this category are older than 35 years. Tecnam Aircraft Industries and the Department of Aerospace Engineering (DIAS) of the University of Naples "Federico II" are dee...

We show how to combine Bayes nets and game theory to predict the behavior of hybrid systems involving both humans and automated components. We call this novel framework “Semi Network-Form Games,” and illustrate it by predicting aircraft pilot behavior in potential near mid-air collisions. At present, at the beginning of such potential collisions, a collision avoidance system in the aircraft coc...

In the present paper, an efficient method for three dimensional aircraft pattern recognition is introduced. In this method, a set of simple area based features extracted from silhouette of aerial vehicles are used to recognize an aircraft type from its optical or infrared images taken by a CCD camera or a FLIR sensor. These images can be taken from any direction and distance relative to the fly...

While the applications of computational fluid dynamics are pervasive throughout applied science and engineering, ranging from astrophysics to the design of cooling systems for semi-conductors, its role in aircraft design is crucial to an unusual extent, because of the narrow margins within which aircraft can operate efficiently. If computational aerodynamics is to be truly effective in the desi...

The model based design of advanced flight control systems raises many computational challenges both in developing design adequate models as well as in solving optimization based controller tuning and assessment problems. The generation of uncertainty models for aircraft dynamics and the development of low order aeroelastic models are two modelling problems leading to symbolic and numerical comp...