Download or read book Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Rendezvous for Automated Aerial Refueling written by Brian S. Burns and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Automated Aerial Refueling Research written by Jacob Hinchman and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Briefing reports on multi-vehicle wind tunnel tests conducted by Bihrle to obtain interaction data between a KC-135 tanker and a UAV receiver. The data will be used to develop a refueling simulation to evaluate controllability and preliminary automated designs for UAV refueling. The briefing discusses use of this data with a combination of automatic refueling and collision avoidance. This is very preliminary data on interactions. It has military application for advanced UAV refueling.

Download or read book Advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles written by Kimon P. Valavanis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-02-26 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past decade has seen tremendous interest in the production and refinement of unmanned aerial vehicles, both fixed-wing, such as airplanes and rotary-wing, such as helicopters and vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. This book provides a diversified survey of research and development on small and miniature unmanned aerial vehicles of both fixed and rotary wing designs. From historical background to proposed new applications, this is the most comprehensive reference yet.

Download or read book Terminal Guidance for Autonomous Aerial Refueling written by Nicholas S. Higgins and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: Autonomous Aerial Refueling of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV-AAR) has been determined to be possible through the development of an autonomous system with terminal guidance capabilities for a probe-and-drogue refueling configuration. An aircraft tanker and UAV were selected for analysis and determination of system constraints. The UAV's mechanics and performance characteristics were determined to understand the aircraft's stability and controllability characteristics. A hardware system necessary for autonomously docking the probe with the drogue was developed using colored light emitting diodes. The flow-field behind an aircraft tanker wing was analyzed to understand the effects of the wake acting on the aircraft to be refueled, and to determine where the pilot must initiate the terminal guidance system. From this analysis, it was determined that the UAV will enter the dangerous flow-field at about 175 feet behind the location of the drogue, approximately 250 feet from the tanker's wing. This area was named the terminal flight arena - the area in which the pilot can no longer control the UAV without a guidance system. Multiple fixed-flight paths for this flight arena were analyzed to determine changing forces acting on the UAV. Utilizing the determined performance characteristics, the control surface deflections necessary for steady flight through these fixed-flight paths were calculated. The best fixed-flight path for UAV-AAR was a path angled ten degrees below a horizontal path, which resulted in the most minimal change of control surface deflection throughout the terminal flight arena. The overall fixed-flight path control surface deflection analysis will be used to assist in developing a strategy for an autonomous system. The Dual-Optimal Path-Planning technique will be implemented for development of the autonomous system for terminal guidance. The technique will follow a given loop which will allow the UAV to fly within a predetermined window based on the UAV's maneuvering abilities, the locations of minimum induced force that will act on the UAV, the location and orientation of the drogue, and the quickest path for approach and a successful rendezvous.

Download or read book Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Breakthroughs in Research and Practice written by Management Association, Information Resources and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2019-05-03 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First used in military applications, unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming an integral aspect of modern society and are expanding into the commercial, scientific, recreational, agricultural, and surveillance sectors. With the increasing use of these drones by government officials, business professionals, and civilians, more research is needed to understand their complexity both in design and function. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice is a critical source of academic knowledge on the design, construction, and maintenance of drones, as well as their applications across all aspects of society. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as intelligent systems, artificial intelligence, and situation awareness, this publication is an ideal reference source for military consultants, military personnel, business professionals, operation managers, surveillance companies, agriculturalists, policymakers, government officials, law enforcement, IT professionals, academicians, researchers, and graduate-level students.

Download or read book The NASA Dryden Flight Test Approach to an Aerial Refueling System written by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The integration of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) into controlled airspace has generated a new era of autonomous technologies and challenges. Autonomous aerial refueling would enable UAVs to travel further distances and loiter for extended periods over time-critical targets. The NASA Dryden Flight Research Center recently has completed a flight research project directed at developing a dynamic hose and drogue system model to support the development of an automated aerial refueling system. A systematic dynamic model of the hose and drogue system would include the effects of various influences on the system, such as flight condition, hose and drogue type, tanker type and weight, receiver type, and tanker and receiver maneuvering. Using two NASA F/A-18 aircraft and a conventional hose and drogue aerial refueling store from the Navy, NASA has obtained flight research data that document the response of the hose and drogue system to these effects. Preliminary results, salient trends, and important lessons are presentedHansen, Jennifer L. and Murray, James E. and Campos, Norma V.Armstrong Flight Research CenterAIR TO AIR REFUELING; DYNAMIC MODELS; AUTONOMY; F-18 AIRCRAFT; TIME DEPENDENCE

Download or read book Autonomous Safety Control of Flight Vehicles written by Xiang Yu and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2021-02-12 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aerospace vehicles are by their very nature a crucial environment for safety-critical systems. By virtue of an effective safety control system, the aerospace vehicle can maintain high performance despite the risk of component malfunction and multiple disturbances, thereby enhancing aircraft safety and the probability of success for a mission. Autonomous Safety Control of Flight Vehicles presents a systematic methodology for improving the safety of aerospace vehicles in the face of the following occurrences: a loss of control effectiveness of actuators and control surface impairments; the disturbance of observer-based control against multiple disturbances; actuator faults and model uncertainties in hypersonic gliding vehicles; and faults arising from actuator faults and sensor faults. Several fundamental issues related to safety are explicitly analyzed according to aerospace engineering system characteristics; while focusing on these safety issues, the safety control design problems of aircraft are studied and elaborated on in detail using systematic design methods. The research results illustrate the superiority of the safety control approaches put forward. The expected reader group for this book includes undergraduate and graduate students but also industry practitioners and researchers. About the Authors: Xiang Yu is a Professor with the School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China. His research interests include safety control of aerospace engineering systems, guidance, navigation, and control of unmanned aerial vehicles. Lei Guo, appointed as "Chang Jiang Scholar Chair Professor", is a Professor with the School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China. His research interests include anti-disturbance control and filtering, stochastic control, and fault detection with their applications to aerospace systems. Youmin Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Aerospace Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Québec, Canada. His research interests include fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control, and cooperative guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) of unmanned aerial/space/ground/surface vehicles. Jin Jiang is a Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada. His research interests include fault-tolerant control of safety-critical systems, advanced control of power plants containing non-traditional energy resources, and instrumentation and control for nuclear power plants.

Download or read book Automated Low Altitude Air Delivery written by Johann C. Dauer and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) with a payload capacity of one metric ton for transportation. The authors provide a large variety of perspectives–from economics to technical realization. With the focus on such heavy-lift cargo UAS, the authors consider recently established methods for approval and certification, which they expect to be disruptive for unmanned aviation. In particular, the Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) and its impact on the presented technological solutions and operational concepts are studied. Starting with the assumption of an operation over sparsely populated areas and below common air traffic, diverse measures to further reduce operational risks are proposed. Operational concepts derived from logistics use-cases set the context for an in-depth analysis including aircraft and system design, safe autonomy as well as airspace integration and datalinks. Results from simulations and technology demonstrations are presented as a proof of concept for solutions proposed in this book.

Download or read book Lighter than Air Robots written by Yasmina Bestaoui Sebbane and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An aerial robot is a system capable of sustained flight with no direct human control and able to perform a specific task. A lighter than air robot is an aerial robot that relies on the static lift to balance its own weight. It can also be defined as a lighter than air unmanned aerial vehicle or an unmanned airship with sufficient autonomy. Lighter than air systems are particularly appealing since the energy to keep them airborne is small. They are increasingly considered for various tasks such as monitoring, surveillance, advertising, freight carrier, transportation. This book familiarizes readers with a hierarchical decoupled planning and control strategy that has been proven efficient through research. It is made up of a hierarchy of modules with well defined functions operating at a variety of rates, linked together from top to bottom. The outer loop, closed periodically, consists of a discrete search that produces a set of waypoints leading to the goal while avoiding obstacles and weighed regions. The second level smoothes this set so that the generated paths are feasible given the vehicle's velocity and accelerations limits. The third level generates flyable, timed trajectories and the last one is the tracking controller that attempts to minimize the error between the robot measured trajectory and the reference trajectory. This hierarchy is reflected in the structure and content of the book. Topics treated are: Modelling, Flight Planning, Trajectory Design and Control. Finally, some actual projects are described in the appendix. This volume will prove useful for researchers and practitioners working in Robotics and Automation, Aerospace Technology, Control and Artificial Intelligence.

Download or read book Autonomous Aerial Refueling of Unmanned Air Vehicles Utilizing a Vision Based Navigation System written by Jennifer Jones Kimmett and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Automated Aerial Refueling Presentation to 2007 ARSAG Conference written by Jacob Hinchman and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This presentation was prepared for the 2007 Aerial Refueling Systems Advisory Group (ARSAG) conference to update the status of the Automated Aerial Refueling (AAR) program at the Air Force Research Laboratory. The AAR technology suite has application to both manned and unmanned vehicles. For unmanned vehicles, AAR allows eliminates the tyranny of fuel, allowing unmanned vehicles to be based, deployed, and employed like manned systems. Furthermore as manned mission durations increase, aerial refueling becomes more and more strenuous on the pilot. AAR seeks to reduce the workload in cockpit and provide a in-weather refueling capability. Also, this technology allows manned or unmanned platforms to fly formation in IFR conditions.

Download or read book Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Applications Challenges and Trends written by Mohamed Abdelkader and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-29 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book that covers different aspects of UAV technology, including design and development, applications, security and communication, and legal and regulatory challenges. The book is divided into 13 chapters, grouped into four parts. The first part discusses the design and development of UAVs, including ROS customization, structured designs, and intelligent trajectory tracking. The second part explores diverse applications such as search and rescue, monitoring distributed parameter systems, and leveraging drone technology in accounting. The third part focuses on security and communication challenges, including security concerns, multi-UAV systems, and communications security. The final part delves into the legal and regulatory challenges of integrating UAVs into non-segregated airspace. The book serves as a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, and students in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles, providing a comprehensive understanding of UAV technology and its applications.

Download or read book Guidance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles written by Rafael Yanushevsky and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an expert with more than 30 years of experience, Guidance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles contains new analytical results, taken from the author’s research, which can be used for analysis and design of unmanned aerial vehicles guidance and control systems. This book progresses from a clear elucidation of guidance laws and unmanned aerial vehicle dynamics to the modeling of their guidance and control systems. Special attention is paid to guidance of autonomous UAVs, which differs from traditional missile guidance. The author explains UAV applications, contrasting them to a missile’s limited ability (or inability) to control axial acceleration. The discussion of guidance laws for UAVs presents a generalization of missile guidance laws developed by the author. The computational algorithms behind these laws are tested in three applications—for the surveillance problem, the refueling problem, and for the motion control of a swarm of UAVs. The procedure of choosing and testing the guidance laws is also considered in an example of future generation of airborne interceptors launched from UAVs. The author provides an innovative presentation of the theoretical aspects of unmanned aerial vehicles’ guidance that cannot be found in any other book. It presents new ideas that, once crystallized, can be implemented in the new generation of unmanned aerial systems.

Download or read book Autonomous Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles written by Victor Becerra and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2019-06-24 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being increasingly used in different applications in both military and civilian domains. These applications include surveillance, reconnaissance, remote sensing, target acquisition, border patrol, infrastructure monitoring, aerial imaging, industrial inspection, and emergency medical aid. Vehicles that can be considered autonomous must be able to make decisions and react to events without direct intervention by humans. Although some UAVs are able to perform increasingly complex autonomous manoeuvres, most UAVs are not fully autonomous; instead, they are mostly operated remotely by humans. To make UAVs fully autonomous, many technological and algorithmic developments are still required. For instance, UAVs will need to improve their sensing of obstacles and subsequent avoidance. This becomes particularly important as autonomous UAVs start to operate in civilian airspaces that are occupied by other aircraft. The aim of this volume is to bring together the work of leading researchers and practitioners in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles with a common interest in their autonomy. The contributions that are part of this volume present key challenges associated with the autonomous control of unmanned aerial vehicles, and propose solution methodologies to address such challenges, analyse the proposed methodologies, and evaluate their performance.

Download or read book Intelligent Autonomy of UAVs written by Yasmina Bestaoui Sebbane and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intelligent Autonomy of UAVs: Advanced Missions and Future Use provides an approach to the formulation of the fundamental task typical to any mission and provides guidelines of how this task can be solved by different generic robotic problems. As such, this book aims to provide a systems engineering approach to UAV projects, discovering the real problems that need to be resolved independently of the application. After an introduction to the rapidly evolving field of aerial robotics, the book presents topics such as autonomy, mission analysis, human-UAV teams, homogeneous and heterogeneous UAV teams, and finally, UAV-UGV teams. It then covers generic robotic problems such as orienteering and coverage. The book next introduces deployment, patrolling, and foraging, while the last part of the book tackles an important application: aerial search, tracking, and surveillance. This book is meant for both scientists and practitioners. For practitioners, it presents existing solutions that are categorized according to various missions: surveillance and reconnaissance, 3D mapping, urban monitoring, precision agriculture, forestry, disaster assessment and monitoring, security, industrial plant inspection, etc. For scientists, it provides an overview of generic robotic problems such as coverage and orienteering; deployment, patrolling and foraging; search, tracking, and surveillance. The design and analysis of algorithms raise a unique combination of questions from many fields, including robotics, operational research, control theory, and computer science.

Download or read book Limited Evaluation of Sensor Requirements for Autonomous Air Refueling Rendezvous Project Medium Rare written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report presents the results of Project MEDIUM RARE, a limited evaluation of sensor requirements for UAV autonomous air refueling rendezvous. The overall test objective was to determine sensor field-of-regard and detection range requirements for an array of tanker aspect angles that would allow successful autonomous, UAV rendezvous. The Air Force Research Laboratory requested this testing. The USAF Test Pilot School, Class 03A, conducted 8 flight test sorties totaling 12.5 hours at Edwards AFB, California, from 7 Oct to 28 Oct 03. All test objectives were met.

Download or read book Multiple Heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles written by Aníbal Ollero and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-09-02 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complete with online files and updates, this cutting-edge text looks at the next generation of unmanned flying machines. Aerial robots can be considered as an evolution of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This book provides a complete overview of all the issues related to aerial robotics, addressing problems ranging from flight control to terrain perception and mission planning and execution. The major challenges and potentials of heterogeneous UAVs are comprehensively explored.