Download or read book Trajectory Generation and Controller Design for a Quadrotor slung Load System written by Sean Fielding and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), in particular quadrotors, have received increased interest recently for a variety of applications including aerial photography and payload transportation. Unlike fixed wing aircraft, quadrotors are well suited to flying in crowded urban environments due to their ability to hover as well as takeoff and land vertically. These drones are inherently difficult to fly though and typically require skilled pilots or assistive controllers. This presents significant barriers for companies looking to use quadrotors for novel applications. In response to this limitation, there has been a significant focus on developing flight controllers and flight trajectory generators to enable autonomous operation of quadrotor drones.While aerial photography applications are already well established for quadrotors, autonomous payload delivery presents an ongoing challenge. Currently, parcel delivery with quadrotors typically requires mounting a rigid container to the underside of the vehicle and filling this container with items. This configuration limits the size and shape of objects that can be transported, adds weight to the vehicle and adversely affects its attitude dynamics. A compelling alternative, inspired from military helicopters, is to suspend the payload from the underside of the quadrotor via one or more cables. Doing so saves weight and significantly reduces the impact that the payload has on the vehicle's attitude dynamics. The resulting quadrotor-slung load system also offers versatility in terms of the size and shape of payload that can be transportedThe deployment of autonomous quadrotor-slung load systems presents numerous challenges though. A slung load will inherently tend to swing underneath the drone when acted upon by external disturbances like wind gusts. This can lead to instability in the system and potentially cause the drone to crash. It is thus critical to develop robust flight controllers for quadrotor-slung load systems that can autonomously track prescribed delivery routes while suppressing the swinging motion of the payload. Significant swinging motion can also be induced in the slung load as a result of the flight trajectory of the quadrotor drone. We should thus specifically design flight trajectories that help to prevent swinging motion from being induced.At its core, this thesis seeks to develop techniques to both prevent and actively suppress swinging motion for an autonomous slung load system. In the following chapters we begin by exploring how quadrotor flight trajectories affect the swinging motion of a slung payload. In particular we focus on the technique of input shaping desired flight trajectories to help prevent induced payload swinging. We demonstrate how this concept can be extended to non-rest to rest flight trajectories and develop a computationally simple algorithm for generating these flight trajectories onboard a quadrotor as it flies. We next develop a flight controller to enable an autonomous quadrotor-slung load system to track these prescribed input-shaped flight trajectories. We explore existing designs for such controllers and develop a novel approach that distinguishes between swinging motion caused by tracking a prescribed flight trajectory and that caused by external disturbances. We demonstrate in simulation how this proposed controller is able to manage swinging disturbances while tracking an input-shaped flight trajectory better than two baseline controller designs. We later demonstrate how the underlying concepts behind this controller can be used to develop a model predictive controller for tracking input-shaped trajectories with a quadrotor-slung load system. We also discuss the implementation of the proposed trajectory generator and controller onto an actual quadrotor drone and some of the challenges faced during this process. We conclude by making recommendations for future work for this project"--

Download or read book Adaptive Hybrid Control of Quadrotor Drones written by Nihal Dalwadi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the dynamics of a tail-sitter quadrotor and biplane quadrotor-type hybrid unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and, based on it, various nonlinear controllers design like backstepping control (BSC), ITSMC (Integral Terminal Sliding Mode Control), and hybrid controller (BSC + ITSMC). It discusses single and multiple observer-based control strategies to handle external disturbances like wind gusts and estimate states. It covers the dynamics of slung load with a biplane quadrotor and a control architecture to handle the effect of partial rotor failure with wind gusts acting on it. An anti-swing control to prevent damage to the slung load and a deflecting surface-based total rotor failure compensation strategy to prevent damage to the biplane quadrotor are also discussed in this book. The monograph will be helpful for undergraduate and post-graduate students as well as researchers in their advanced studies.

Download or read book Trajectory Generation and Constrained Control of Quadrotors written by Carlos Alberto Tule and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unmanned Aerial Systems, although still in early development, are expected to grow in both the military and civil sectors. As part of the UAV sector, the Quadrotor helicopter platform has been receiving a lot of interest from various academic and research institutions because of their simplistic design and low cost to manufacture, yet remaining a challenging platform to control. Four different controllers were derived for the trajectory generation and constrained control of a quadrotor platform. The first approach involves the linear version of the Model predictive Control (MPC) algorithm to solve the state constrained optimization problem. The second appraoch uses the State Dependent Coefficient (SDC) form to capture the system non linearities into a pseudo-linear system matrix, which is used to derive the State Dependent Riccati Equation (SDRE) based optimal control. For the third approach, the SDC form is exploited for obtaining a nonlinear equivalent of the model predictive control. Lastly, a combination of the nonlinear MPC and SDRE optimal control algorithms is used to explor the feasibility of a near real-time nonlinear optimization technique.

Download or read book Trajectory Generation and Control for Quadrotors written by Daniel Mellinger and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Trajectory Generation for a Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle written by Douglas Conover and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has seen substantial progression in the past decade. Trajectory generation and control has been a main focus in this domain, with methods that enable the performance of complex three-dimensional maneuvers through space. Efforts have been made to execute these maneuvers using concepts of nonlinear control and differential flatness. However, a lack of theory for the estimation of higher-order dérivatives of a multirotor UAV has prevented the experimental application of several of these techniques concentrated on trajectory control. This work firstly explores the existing control approach of sequential composition for the execution of quadrotor manoeuvres through narrow windows. This technique involves the combination of several theoretically simple controllers in sequence in order to produce a complex result. Experimental results conducted in the Mobile Robotics and Automated Systems Laboratory (MRASL) at Polytechnique demonstrate the validity of this approach, producing precise and repeatable manoeuvres through narrow windows. However, they also show the limitations of such a method in real world applications, notably its initial inaccuracy and lack of feasibility evaluation. This thesis then focuses on the development of a state-estimation architecture based on linear Kalman filter techniques in order to provide a real-time value of a quadrotor UAV's second and third derivatives (referred to as acceleration and jerk, respectively). Filters of different complexities are developed with the goal of incorporating all available system information into the resulting estimate. A full-state estimator is produced that uses a quadrotor's position and acceleration measurements as well as control inputs in order to be usable for feedback. A jerk-augmented controller based off of optimal control theory is then developed in order to validate this estimator. It is designed in such a way to use the UAV's jerk, acceleration, velocity and position as design parameters and to be unstable without feedback in each of these terms. Tests are conducted in order to examine the performance of both the estimator and controller. Firstly, the quadrotor is commanded to track various reference inputs in 3D space to ensure its stability. The controller tracks these references very closely to simulated responses. The controller is then asked to follow a changing reference in order to evaluate the precision of the developed estimator. Results show that the real-time estimation of the jerk follows offline values adequately. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application to implement the feedback of a multirotor UAV's jerk in real-world experimentation.

Download or read book Path Following Control for Multiple Quadrotors Carrying A Rigid body Slung Payload written by Longhao Qian and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novel robust path-following flight controllers for quadrotors carrying a tethered payload are extensively studied from the perspective of dynamic modelling, control design, and experimental verification. By using multiple quadrotors to cooperatively carry a payload, their payload capacities can be significantly boosted. The number of vehicles can be adjusted according to the weight of the payload, resulting in a flexible and efficient use of drone resources. The presented model development starts from a single quadrotor with a point-mass payload to multiple quadrotors with a rigid-body payload. The payload is towed by quadrotors with cables. The systems are decomposed into the payload subsystem and the quadrotor attitude subsystem by assuming the cable is tethered at the center of mass of each quadrotor. The controller designs are then developed for a single quadrotor with a point-mass payload, followed by controller of multiple quadrotors with a rigid-body payload. Both controllers resemble a cascade form in structure. The outer loop offers a robust path-following controller that stabilizes the payload subsystem by assuming the lift vector of each quadrotor can point instantaneously to a given direction. An uncertainty and disturbance estimator is designed to estimate and eliminate the lumped disturbances caused by exogenous wind and parameter imperfection. The inner loop, on the other hand, is an attitude tracker implemented on each quadrotor to follow a reference attitude generated by the outer-loop controller. The overall stability of the complete system is proven using the Lyapunov method and the Reduction Theorem. Aside from the analytical control law, a model predictive controller (MPC) method is also studied and implemented on quadrotor for cooperative slung payload delivery. The MPC method utilizes the equivalent damping force from the previous controller as the baseline stabilizing inner loop. The linearized closed-loop model is then calculated. Finally, the optimum controller is calculated after a prediction horizon and a cost function are defined. The MPC scheme achieves better performance and requires less parameter tuning. Extensive simulations and experiments show that the controller designs are capable of stabilizing the payload under model imperfection and exogenous disturbances simultaneously.

Download or read book Trajectory Planning and Control of Collaborative Systems written by Etienne Servais and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is dedicated to the creation of a complete framework, from high-level to low-level, of trajectory generation for a group of independent dynamical systems. This framework, based for the trajectory generation, on the resolution of Burgers equation, is applied to a novel model of trirotor UAV and uses the flatness of the two levels of dynamical systems.The first part of this thesis is dedicated to the generation of trajectories. Formal solutions to the heat equation are created using the differential flatness of this equation. These solutions are transformed into solutions to Burgers' equation through Hopf-Cole transformation to match the desired formations. They are optimized to match specific requirements. Several examples of trajectories are given.The second part is dedicated to the autonomous trajectory tracking by a trirotor UAV. This UAV is totally actuated and a nonlinear closed-loop controller is suggested. This controller is tested on the ground and in flight by tracking, rolling or flying, a trajectory. A model is presented and a control approach is suggested to transport a pendulum load.

Download or read book Advances in Aerospace Guidance Navigation and Control written by Florian Holzapfel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last few decades, both the aeronautics and space disciplines have greatly influenced advances in controls, sensors, data fusion and navigation. Many of those achievements that made the word “aerospace” synonymous with “high–tech” were enabled by innovations in guidance, navigation and control. Europe has seen a strong trans-national consolidation process in aerospace over the last few decades. Most of the visible products, like commercial aircraft, fighters, helicopters, satellites, launchers or missiles, are not made by a single country – they are the fruits of cooperation. No European country by itself hosts a specialized guidance, navigation and controls community large enough to cover the whole spectrum of disciplines. However, on a European scale, mutual exchange of ideas, concepts and solutions is enriching for all. The 1st CEAS Specialist Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control is an attempt to bring this community together. This book is a selection of papers presented at the conference. All submitted papers have gone through a formal review process in compliance with good journal practices. The best papers have been recommended by the reviewers to be published in this book.

Download or read book Aerial Manipulation written by Matko Orsag and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text is a thorough treatment of the rapidly growing area of aerial manipulation. It details all the design steps required for the modeling and control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) equipped with robotic manipulators. Starting with the physical basics of rigid-body kinematics, the book gives an in-depth presentation of local and global coordinates, together with the representation of orientation and motion in fixed- and moving-coordinate systems. Coverage of the kinematics and dynamics of unmanned aerial vehicles is developed in a succession of popular UAV configurations for multirotor systems. Such an arrangement, supported by frequent examples and end-of-chapter exercises, leads the reader from simple to more complex UAV configurations. Propulsion-system aerodynamics, essential in UAV design, is analyzed through blade-element and momentum theories, analysis which is followed by a description of drag and ground-aerodynamic effects. The central part of the book is dedicated to aerial-manipulator kinematics, dynamics, and control. Based on foundations laid in the opening chapters, this portion of the book is a structured presentation of Newton–Euler dynamic modeling that results in forward and backward equations in both fixed- and moving-coordinate systems. The Lagrange–Euler approach is applied to expand the model further, providing formalisms to model the variable moment of inertia later used to analyze the dynamics of aerial manipulators in contact with the environment. Using knowledge from sensor data, insights are presented into the ways in which linear, robust, and adaptive control techniques can be applied in aerial manipulation so as to tackle the real-world problems faced by scholars and engineers in the design and implementation of aerial robotics systems. The book is completed by path and trajectory planning with vision-based examples for tracking and manipulation.

Download or read book Dynamic Modeling Trajectory Generation and Tracking for Towed Cable Systems written by Liang Sun and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, we focus on the strategy that places and stabilizes the path of an aerial drogue, which is towed by a mothership aircraft using a long flexible cable, onto a horizontally flat orbit by maneuvering the mothership in the presence of wind. To achieve this goal, several studies for towed cable systems are conducted, which include the dynamic modeling for the cable, trajectory generation strategies for the mothership, trajectory-tracking control law design, and simulation and flight test implementations.

Download or read book Robot Operating System ROS written by Anis Koubaa and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-25 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second volume is a continuation of the successful first volume of this Springer book, and as well as addressing broader topics it puts a particular focus on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with Robot Operating System (ROS). Consisting of three types of chapters: tutorials, cases studies, and research papers, it provides comprehensive additional material on ROS and the aspects of developing robotics systems, algorithms, frameworks, and applications with ROS. ROS is being increasingly integrated in almost all kinds of robots and is becoming the de-facto standard for developing applications and systems for robotics. Although the research community is actively developing applications with ROS and extending its features, amount of literature references is not representative of the huge amount of work being done. The book includes 19 chapters organized into six parts: Part 1 presents the control of UAVs with ROS, while in Part 2, three chapters deal with control of mobile robots. Part 3 provides recent work toward integrating ROS with Internet, cloud and distributed systems. Part 4 offers five case studies of service robots and field experiments. Part 5 presents signal-processing tools for perception and sensing, and lastly, Part 6 introduces advanced simulation frameworks. The diversity of topics in the book makes it a unique and valuable reference resource for ROS users, researchers, learners and developers.

Download or read book Analysis of Advanced Control Methods for Quadrotor Trajectory Tracking written by Tyler Milburn and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonlinear systems are difficult to design a stabilizing and optimized control for, and with the increase of use of quadrotors by researchers, industry, and hobbyists, existing control methods should be analyzed to test the ability to control these devices. Many off-the-shelf quadrotors rely on onboard sensing and PID controllers to remain stable, however these devices are more commonly being used to perform fast obstacle avoidance and trajectory tracking, whose fast dynamics may not be trackable with PID controllers. We consider Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), iterative LQR, and Differential Flatness-based control methods to a quadrotor system to compare their performance to the onboard PID controllers. Considering a quadrotor used for tracking trajectories with a narrow corridor, the different controllers were designed and simulated using Matlab, applying interesting situations to test the robustness of the controllers, including noisy state measurements, delayed control action, and uncertainty in system parameters. In each scenario, the flatness-based control method is superior in robustly tracking the desired trajectory without requiring high computational power, possibly allowing the full control method to be implemented on a quadrotor microcontroller and improving the performance of the quadrotor's tracking abilities.

Download or read book Robotics Research written by Nancy M. Amato and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 1058 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ISRR, the "International Symposium on Robotics Research", is one of robotics pioneering Symposia, which has established over the past two decades some of the field's most fundamental and lasting contributions. This book presents the results of the eighteenth edition of "Robotics Research" ISRR17, offering a collection of a broad range of topics in robotics. This symposium took place in Puerto Varas, Chile from December 11th to December 14th, 2017. The content of the contributions provides a wide coverage of the current state of robotics research, the advances and challenges in its theoretical foundation and technology basis, and the developments in its traditional and new emerging areas of applications. The diversity, novelty, and span of the work unfolding in these areas reveal the field's increased maturity and expanded scope and define the state of the art of robotics and its future direction.

Download or read book Intelligent Control of a Quadrotor with Suspended Load written by Arash Mohammadhasani and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis targets output tracking problem for payload position and quadrotor yaw in an slung load system (SLS). In spite of its relatively extensive literature, full SLS control is still a challenging problem since its dimension, nonlinearity, and multiple sources of disturbances are not easy to handle using available nonlinear control tools. Based on the inherent property of SLS having a flat output, in this thesis, we tried to solve the robust output tracking using tools from differential geometry and reinforcement learning (RL). We first construct a control-affine model for SLS which is novel in that it is written in pendulum coordinates and considers disturbances in pendulum dynamics. Our payload is modelled as a single pendulum attached to the center of mass (CoM) of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a spherical joint. Based on this model, we use dynamic extension algorithm (DEA) to reformulate SLS dynamics so that the derived system is feedback linearizable and yet complies with our original output tracking problem. Static state feedback linearization of the augmented system then provides linear time-invariant (LTI) tracking error dynamics in the linearizing state coordinates. These dynamics are exponentially stable on a well-defined and practical region of state space for constant disturbances. Moreover, we provide a Maple symbolic script which can be used to apply DEA to general nonlinear control-affine systems. Finally, we employ ideas from RL to further robustify our proposed DEA-based control scheme against disturbances and to fill its weaknesses in model dependency. We cover all required definitions and algorithms and highlight what distinguishes the proposed approach from conventional RL-based control. Closed-loop performance is validated in simulation and compared with a state-of-the-art method from the literature.

Download or read book Aerial Robotic Manipulation written by Anibal Ollero and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aerial robotic manipulation integrates concepts and technologies coming from unmanned aerial systems and robotics manipulation. It includes not only kinematic, dynamics, aerodynamics and control but also perception, planning, design aspects, mechatronics and cooperation between several aerial robotics manipulators. All these topics are considered in this book in which the main research and development approaches in aerial robotic manipulation are presented, including the description of relevant systems. In addition of the research aspects, the book also includes the deployment of real systems both indoors and outdoors, which is a relevant characteristic of the book because most results of aerial robotic manipulation have been validated only indoor using motion tracking systems. Moreover, the book presents two relevant applications: structure assembly and inspection and maintenance, which has started to be applied in the industry. The Chapters of the book will present results of two main European Robotics Projects in aerial robotics manipulation: FP7 ARCAS and H2020 AEROARMS. FP7 ARCAS defined the basic concepts on aerial robotic manipulation, including cooperative manipulation. The H2020 AEROARMS on aerial robot with multiple arms and advanced manipulation capabilities for inspection and maintenance has two general objectives: (1) development of advanced aerial robotic manipulation methods and technologies, including manipulation with dual arms and multi-directional thrusters aerial platforms; and (2) application to the inspection and maintenance.

Download or read book Modeling and Formation Controller Design for Multi quadrotor Systems with Leader follower Configuration written by Zhicheng Hou and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thesis, we address a leader-follower (L-F) formation control problem for multiple UAVs, especially quadrotors. Different from existing works, the strategies, which are proposed in our work, consider that the leader(s) have interaction with the followers. Additionally, the leader(s) are changeable during the formation. First, the mathematical modeling of a single quadrotor and of the formation of quadrotors is developed. The trajectory tracking problem for a single quadrotor is investigated. Through the analysis of the flatness of the quadrotor dynamical model, the desired trajectory for each quadrotor is transferred to the design of the desired at outputs. A flatness-based trajectory tracking controller is, then, proposed. Considering the double-loop property of the closed-loop quadrotor dynamics, a high-gain attitude controller is designed, according to the singular perturbation system theory. Since the closed-loop quadrotor dynamics performs in two time scales, the rotational dynamics (boundary-layer model) is controlled in a fast time scale. The formation controller design is then only considered for the translational dynamics: reduced model in a slow time scale. This result has simplified the formation controller design such that the reduced model of the quadrotor is considered instead of the complete model. Since the reduced model of the quadrotor has a double-integrator characteristic, consensus algorithm for multiple double-integrator systems is proposed. Dealing with the leader-follower formation problem, an interaction matrix is originally proposed based on the Laplacian matrix. We prove that the convergence condition and convergence speed of the formation error are in terms of the smallest eigenvalue of the interaction matrix. Three formation control strategies with fixed formation topology are then proposed. The flatness-based formation control is proposed to deal with the aggressive formation problem, while the high-order derivatives of the desired trajectory for each UAV are estimated by using an observer; the Lyapunov redesign is developed to deal with the nonlinearities of the translational dynamics of the quadrotors; the hyperbolic tangent-based bounded control with composite nonlinear feedback is developed in order to improve the performance of the formation. In an additional way, a saturated switching control of the formation is investigated, where the formation topology is switching. The stability of the system is obtained by introducing the convex hull theory and the common Lyapunov function. This switching control strategy permits the change of the leaders in the formation. Inspired by some existing works, such as the anonymous neighbor-based formation control, we finally propose a weighted neighbor-based control, which shows better robustness than the anonymous neighbor-based control. Simulation results using Matlab primarily illustrate our proposed formation control strategies. Furthermore, using C++ programming, our strategies are implemented on the simulator-experiment framework, developed at Heudiasyc laboratory. Through a variety of tests on the simulator and real-time experiments, the efficiency and the advantages of our proposed formation control strategies are shown. Finally, a vision-based inter-distance detection system is developed. This system is composed by an on-board camera, infrared LEDs and an infrared filter. The idea is to detect the UAVs and calculate the inter-distance by calculating the area of the special LEDs patterns. This algorithm is validated on a PC, with a webcam and primarily implemented on a real quadrotor.

Download or read book Handbook of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles written by Kimon P. Valavanis and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is a reference text for the academic and research communities, industry, manufacturers, users, practitioners, Federal Government, Federal and State Agencies, the private sector, as well as all organizations that are and will be using unmanned aircraft in a wide spectrum of applications. The Handbook covers all aspects of UAVs, from design to logistics and ethical issues. It is also targeting the young investigator, the future inventor and entrepreneur by providing an overview and detailed information of the state-of-the-art as well as useful new concepts that may lead to innovative research. The contents of the Handbook include material that addresses the needs and ‘know how’ of all of the above sectors targeting a very diverse audience. The Handbook offers a unique and comprehensive treatise of everything one needs to know about unmanned aircrafts, from conception to operation, from technologies to business activities, users, OEMs, reference sources, conferences, publications, professional societies, etc. It should serve as a Thesaurus, an indispensable part of the library for everyone involved in this area. For the first time, contributions by the world’s top experts from academia, industry, government and the private sector, are brought together to provide unique perspectives on the current state-of-the-art in UAV, as well as future directions. The Handbook is intended for the expert/practitioner who seeks specific technical/business information, for the technically-oriented scientists and engineers, but also for the novice who wants to learn more about the status of UAV and UAV-related technologies. The Handbook is arranged in a user-friendly format, divided into main parts referring to: UAV Design Principles; UAV Fundamentals; UAV Sensors and Sensing Strategies; UAV Propulsion; UAV Control; UAV Communication Issues; UAV Architectures; UAV Health Management Issues; UAV Modeling, Simulation, Estimation and Identification; MAVs and Bio-Inspired UAVs; UAV Mission and Path Planning; UAV Autonomy; UAV Sense, Detect and Avoid Systems; Networked UAVs and UAV Swarms; UAV Integration into the National Airspace; UAV-Human Interfaces and Decision Support Systems; Human Factors and Training; UAV Logistics Support; UAV Applications; Social and Ethical Implications; The Future of UAVs. Each part is written by internationally renowned authors who are authorities in their respective fields. The contents of the Handbook supports its unique character as a thorough and comprehensive reference book directed to a diverse audience of technologists, businesses, users and potential users, managers and decision makers, novices and experts, who seek a holistic volume of information that is not only a technical treatise but also a source for answers to several questions on UAV manufacturers, users, major players in UAV research, costs, training required and logistics issues.