BEAVIS: Balloon Enabled Aerial Vehicle for IoT and Sensing

UAVs are becoming versatile and valuable platforms for various applications. However, the main limitation is their flying time. We present BEAVIS, a novel aerial robotic platform striking an unparalleled trade-off between the maneuverability of drones and the long-lasting capacity of blimps. BEAVIS scores highly in applications where drones...

Autonomous Control for Orographic Soaring of Fixed-Wing UAVs

We present a novel controller for fixed-wing UAVs that enables autonomous soaring in an orographic wind field, extending flight endurance. Our method identifies soaring regions and addresses position control challenges by introducing a target gradient line (TGL) on which the UAV achieves an equilibrium soaring position, where sink rate and...

DroneVLC: Exploiting Drones and VLC to Gather Data from Batteryless Sensors

We explore a new alternative for drones to gather information from sensors. Instead of using the traditional radio-frequency spectrum, whose broadcast nature makes it more difficult to poll specific objects, we utilize the light spectrum. In our system, the drone carries a light, and flies to an area that it is interested in polling. Only the...

Improving the computational efficiency of ROVIO

ROVIO is one of the state-of-the-art mono visual inertial odometry algorithms. It uses an Iterative Extended Kalman Filter (IEKF) to align features and update the vehicle state simultaneously by including the feature locations in the state vector of the IEKF. This algorithm is single core intensive, which allows using the other cores for other...

Preface

INDI Control for the ObliqueWing-Quad Plane Drone

A type of UAV sharing the advantages of rotorcraft and fixed wing vehicles is the hybrid vehicle. Hybrid UAVs can take-off and land vertically and fly fast and efficient in forward flight due to the presence of a wing generating lift. However, combining the fixed wing and rotorcraft concept ends up in a multi-rotor with large dimensions when...

Design and joint control of a conjoined biplane and quadrotor

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to perform many different missions, some of which may require a large aircraft for endurance and a small aircraft for manoeuvrability in a building. This paper proposes a novel combination of a quadrotor and a hybrid biplane capable of joint hover, joint forward flight, and mid-air disassembly...

Preliminary Design and Capacity Study of Automatic Dependent Surveillance for Drones

The consumer drone sector is expected to grow rapidly in the coming decades. In Europe alone, some predictions show as many as seven million drones will be flying by 2050. This poses a challenge for surveillance. In this paper, we study an Automatic Dependent Surveillance system concept similar to the one for current aircraft surveillance, which...

Dual-axis tilting rotor quad-plane design, simulation, flight and performance comparison with a conventional quad-plane design

In the last few decades, the UAV research has been focusing on hybrid vehicles with Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) capabilities. Opposed to copters, hybrid vehicles are highly influenced by wind disturbances. This paper presents a novel quad-plane design that uses four dual-axis tilting rotors to enhance the wind rejection capability of...

Flight code convergence: fixedwing, rotorcraft, hybrid

Rotorcraft, fixed wing and hybrid Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) each have applications in which they excel. Traditionally, dedicated autopilot control code is written to accommodate flight of each UAV type. This causes fragmentation of control code and may lead to performance differences or errors. In this paper, we propose to use the same INDI...

Parametric Investigation on Simulated Staring FMCW Radar for Anti-Drone Swarms

This paper presents parametric investigation results on a staring FMCW radar system which targets drone swarms. The parametric investigation has been carried out by using the RAPID-SIM which facilitates system-level analysis of drone swarms' radar signatures. This paper explains concepts of the simulator's each module and also covers two...

FLEXOP – Application of aeroelastic tailoring to a flying demonstrator wing

This paper presents the application of aeroelastic tailoring in the design of flying demonstrator wings. The work is part of the Flutter Free Flight Envelope eXpansion (FLEXOP) project, funded under the Horizon 2020 framework. The project involves the design, manufacturing and flight-testing of a UAV toward two principle goals: i) to demonstrate...

Design of a synthetic vsion overlay for UAV autoland monitoring

For Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), autonomous forms of autoland are being pursued that do not depend on special, deployability restraining, ground-based equipment for the generation of the reference path to the runway. Typically, these forms of autoland use runway location data from an onboard database to generate the reference path to the...

Using perspective guidance overlay to improve UAV manual control performance

The guidance information that is available to the UAV operator typically suffers from limitations of data update rate and system latency. Even when using a flight director command display, the manual control task is considerably more difficult compared to piloting a manned aircraft. Results from earlier research into perspective guidance...

Post-buckled precompressed (PBP) subsonic micro flight control actuators and surfaces

This paper describes a new class of flight control actuators using Post-Buckled Precompressed (PBP) piezoelectric elements to provide much improved actuator performance. These PBP actuator elements are modeled using basic large deflection Euler-beam estimations accounting for laminated plate effects. The deflection estimations are then coupled...

Synthetic vision to augment sensor based vision for remotely piloted vehicles

In the past fifteen years, several research programs have demonstrated potential advantages of synthetic vision technology for manned aviation. More recently, some research programs have focused on integrating synthetic vision technology into control stations for remotely controlled aircraft. The contribution of synthetic vision can be divided...

Post-Buckled Precompressed (PBP) piezoelectric actuators for UAV flight control

This paper presents the use of a new class of flight control actuators employing Post-Buckled Precompressed (PBP) piezoelectric elements in morphing wing Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The new actuator relieson axial compression to amplify deflections and control forces simultaneously. Two designs employing morphingwing panels based on PBP...

Post-buckled precompressed (PBP) elements: A new class of flight control actuators enhancing high-speed autonomous VTOL MAVs

This paper describes a new class of flight control actuators using Post-Buckled Precompressed (PBP) piezoelectric elements. These actuators are designed to produce significantly higher deflection and force levels than conventional piezoelectric actuator elements. Classical laminate plate theory (CLPT) models are shown to work very well in...