Engineering Commons^™

Implementation Of Path Planning Methods To Detect And Avoid Gps Signal Degradation In Urban Environments, Ayush Raminedi

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

In the modern world, various missions are being carried out under the assistance of autonomous flight vehicles due to their ability to operate in a wide range of flight conditions. Regardless, these autonomous vehicles are prone to GPS signal loss in urban environments due to obstructions that cause scintillation, multi-path, and shadowing. These effects that decrease the GPS functionality can deteriorate the accuracy of GPS positioning causing losses in signal tracking leading to a decrease in navigation performance. These effects are modeled into the simulation environment and are used as part of the path planning algorithm to provide better navigation …

Autonomous Strike Uavs For Counterterrorism Missions: Challenges And Preliminary Solutions, Meshari Aljohani, Ravi Mukkamala, Stephan Olariu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

UAVs are becoming a crucial tool in modern warfare, primarily due to their cost-effectiveness, risk reduction, and ability to perform a wider range of activities. The use of autonomous UAVs to conduct strike missions against highly valuable targets is the focus of this research. Due to developments in ledger technology, smart contracts, and machine learning, such activities formerly carried out by professionals or remotely flown UAVs are now feasible. Our study provides the first in-depth analysis of challenges and potential solutions for successful implementation of an autonomous UAV mission.

Uav To Carry Heavy Loads, Jacob Cannon, Robert Connor Downs, Anthony Orlando

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Our senior design project aims to develop an innovative Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) capable of carrying heavy payloads up to 50 lbs. This UAV will address the growing demand for efficient and autonomous cargo transportation, unlocking new possibilities in logistics and remote deliveries. The primary goal is to design, build, and test a robust UAV platform equipped with advanced propulsion systems, stabilizing mechanisms, and a secure payload attachment system. The heavy-lift UAV will be capable of transporting payloads in challenging environments, enhancing its versatility for various industries, including emergency response, disaster relief, and commercial logistics. For the extent of this …

Integrated Immunity-Based Methodology For Uav Monitoring And Control, Ryan G. Mclaughlin

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

A general integrated and comprehensive health management framework based on the artificial immune system (AIS) paradigm is formulated and an automated system is developed and tested through simulation for the detection, identification, evaluation, and accommodation (DIEA) of abnormal conditions (ACs) on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The proposed methodology involves the establishment of a body of data to represent the function of the vehicle under nominal conditions, called the self, and differentiating this operation from that of the vehicle under an abnormal condition, referred to as the non-self. Data collected from simulations of the selected UAV autonomously flying a set …

Enhancing Trajectory-Based Operations For Uavs Through Hexagonal Grid Indexing: A Step Towards 4d Integration Of Utm And Atm, Deepudev Sahadevan Neelakandan, Hannah Al Ali

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

Aviation is expected to face a surge in the number of manned aircraft and drones in the coming years, making it necessary to integrate Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM) into Air Traffic Management (ATM) to ensure safe and efficient operations. This research proposes a novel hexagonal grid-based 4D trajectory representation framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) traffic management that overcomes the limitations of existing square/cubic trajectory representation methods. The proposed model employs a hierarchical indexing structure using hexagonal cells, enabling efficient ground based strategic conflict detection and conflict free 4D trajectory planning. Additionally, the use of Hexagonal Discrete Global …

On-Board Artificial Intelligence For Failure Detection And Safe Trajectory Generation, Eduardo Morillo

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The use of autonomous flight vehicles has recently increased due to their versatility and capability of carrying out different type of missions in a wide range of flight conditions. Adequate commanded trajectory generation and modification, as well as high-performance trajectory tracking control laws have been an essential focus of researchers given that integration into the National Air Space (NAS) is becoming a primary need. However, the operational safety of these systems can be easily affected if abnormal flight conditions are present, thereby compromising the nominal bounds of design of the system's flight envelop and trajectory following. This thesis focuses on …

Low-Cost Uav Swarm For Real-Time Object Detection Applications, Joel Valdovinos Miranda

Master's Theses

With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, becoming readily available and affordable, applications for these devices have grown immensely. One type of application is the use of drones to fly over large areas and detect desired entities. For example, a swarm of drones could detect marine creatures near the surface of the ocean and provide users the location and type of animal found. However, even with the reduction in cost of drone technology, such applications result costly due to the use of custom hardware with built-in advanced capabilities. Therefore, the focus of this thesis is to compile an …

Precise Landing Of Vtol Uavs Using A Tether, Jeremy W. Rathjen

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are often considered the solution to complex robotics problems. The significant freedom to explore an environment is a major reason why UAVs are a popular choice for automated solutions. UAVs, however, have a very limited flight time due to the low capacity and weight ratio of current batteries. One way to extend the vehicles' flight time is to use a tether to provide power from external batteries, generators on the ground, or another vehicle. Attaching a tether to a vehicle may constrain its navigation but it may also create some opportunities for …

Formation Control With Collision Avoidance For Fixed-Wing Unmanned Air Vehicles With Speed Constraints, Christopher Heintz

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Advances in the miniaturization of powerful electronic components and motors, the democratization of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), and improvements in the performance, safety, and cost in lithium batteries has led to the proliferation of small and relatively inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Many of these UAVs are of the multi-rotor design, however, fixed-wing designs are often more efficient than rotary-wing aircraft, leading to a reduction in the power required for a UAV of a given mass to stay airborne. Autonomous cooperation between multiple UAVs would enable them to complete objectives that would be difficult or impossible for a single …

Autonomous Guidance Of Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles In Basic Fighter Maneuvering, Jeffery G. Dean

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations

Basic fighter maneuvering, or BFM, is the dynamic engagement of two or more aircraft in close-range air combat. The relatively recent introduction of advanced unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) has opened the possibility for automated systems to be players in this arena of air-to-air combat, which has thus far been limited to manned aircraft. In order to design an unmanned system that could fight and win a BFM engagement, the system must include an advanced system for guidance. This dissertation leverages techniques from gain scheduling and incorporates adjustable aimpoint guidance, in order to address the capability for UCAVs to execute …

Tradespace Exploration Of A Uav Conceptual Design Using Model-Based Systems Engineering, Ayan Srivastava

All Theses

The objective of this research is to apply model-based systems engineering approaches to the conceptual design of unmanned aerial vehicles. This is accomplished by evaluating the models of aircraft performance, extracting input and output parameters from the models, creating chains of models, and implementing the models in the MATLAB programming language. By following this process, it is possible to identify the global parameters that remain constant across models, the shared input parameters, the dependencies between models, and the feedback loops with the systems models.

The models are currently implemented in two files using Microsoft MS Excel, one is focused on …

Determination Of Guidance Laws For Uav Systems In Communication Networks Using Collision Cone Theory, Utsav Mudgal

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also commonly known as drones, are used in various applications, including military applications such as surveillance and intelligence-gathering as well as civilian applications such as search and rescue. The use of UAVs to form communication networks is a topic of active research interest. This thesis aims to investigate the development of guidance laws for multiple UAVs to form such communication networks. Toward this end, this thesis employs tools from collision cone theory and incorporates them with parameters used to describe a communication network. Different types of networks are evaluated for use of the guidance laws. Simulation …

Rf Fingerprinting Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Norah Ondus

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) continue to become more readily available, their use in civil, military, and commercial applications is growing significantly. From aerial surveillance to search-and-rescue to package delivery the use cases of UAVs are accelerating. This accelerating popularity gives rise to numerous attack possibilities for example impersonation attacks in drone-based delivery, in a UAV swarm, etc. In order to ensure drone security, in this project we propose an authentication system based on RF fingerprinting. Specifically, we extract and use the device-specific hardware impairments embedded in the transmitted RF signal to separate the identity of each UAV. To achieve …

Robust Nonlinear Tracking Control For Unmanned Aircraft In The Presence Of Wake Vortex, Petr Kazarin, Vladimir Golubev, William Mackunis, Claudia Moreno

Publications

The flight trajectory of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be significantly affected by external disturbances such as turbulence, upstream wake vortices, or wind gusts. These effects present challenges for UAV flight safety. Hence, addressing these challenges is of critical importance for the integration of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System (NAS), especially in terminal zones. This work presents a robust nonlinear control method that has been designed to achieve roll/yaw regulation in the presence of unmodeled external disturbances and system nonlinearities. The data from NASA-conducted airport experimental measurements as well as high-fidelity Large Eddy Simulations of the …

Uav For Medical Equipment Distribution, Richard Barakat, Logan Christensen, Brandon Halebsky, Justin Slavick

Mechanical Engineering

This Final Design Review report documents the senior project participating in the Vertical Flight Society’s 38th Annual Student Design Competition sponsored by The Boeing Company. The goal of this project and competition is to develop an unmanned vertical lift for medical equipment distribution capable of safely delivering a 50 kg payload over distances up to 200 km. This system must be autonomous and have a backup plan to land if any part of the system malfunctions. We discuss the research and justification that drove the selection of the aircraft configuration, a winged quadcopter with a rear propeller. Furthermore, we document …

Flying Wing Uav For Surveillance And Object Tracking, Kristen Padgett, Scott Semmelink, Jared Lasley, Paul Horne

Senior Design Project For Engineers

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have become ubiquitous in recent years due to their adaptability and ease of use. Surveillance UAVs in particular have seen increased interest and usage by law enforcement, civilian security, surveying, and federal services. The increased interest has led to the development of UAVs with increased endurance and payload capacity. Further as many of the applications of surveillance drones involve heightened security requirements, an aircraft of domestic make is preferential to many organizations. With this demand in mind, Inspired Products, LLC put forth a request for assistance in the design and testing of a surveillance UAV. More …

Can The Timeframe Of Reported Uas Sightings Help Regulators?, Spencer Erik Pitcher, Kelly A. Whealan-George

Beyond: Undergraduate Research Journal

Remotely controlled small aircraft, otherwise known as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) or drones have started to impact the United States National Airspace System by interfering with the safe flight of aircraft. As the UAS industry continues its expected growth into the future, lawmakers, as well as regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the aviation community must be able to predict when there will be more UAS craft in the air that could cause an interruption to air traffic so that more resources can be allocated optimally to counter the threat of UAS craft. The purpose of this study …

Analyzing And Improving Calculation And Tuning Process For A Uav, Laurel Wardell

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The nature of this project is confidential and cannot be disclosed in detail. Generally, this project deals with the analysis of a control system of a UAV with several electric motors and gimbals. The goal of this analysis is to improve control calculations for increased stability. In addition, development has been started on an application to streamline the tuning of gains for this particular controller, allowing for more efficient use of precious flight time.

Prospects Of The Development Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Uavs), Rakhimjon Shokirov, Nuriddin Abdujabarov, Takhirov Jonibek, Kadamboy Saytov, Saidbek Bobomurodov

Technical science and innovation

This article outlines the current state of research and development for autonomous unmanned aircraft for civil use. Specifically, the history of UAVs for civil use, research and development in the world, and the topics and prospects for the control and operation of autonomous UAVs for civil use are defined. The perspectives for the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are addressed, programs due to the formation and problems preventing the use of UAVs are listed, and ways of increasing competitiveness are taken into account. This article provides an overview of research involving the advancement of UAV technology for the management …

Three-Dimensional, Vision-Based Proportional Navigation For Uav Collision Avoidance, Guanhong Gao

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

As the number of potential applications for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) keeps rising steadily, the chances that these devices will operate in close proximity to static or dynamic obstacles also increases. Therefore, collision avoidance is an important challenge to overcome for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle operations. Electro-optical devices have several advantages such as light weight, low cost, low algorithm requirements with respect to computational power and possibly night vision capabilities. Therefore, vision-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle collision avoidance has received considerable attention. Although much progress has been made in collision avoidance systems (CAS), most approaches are focused on two-dimensional environments. In order …

Power-Over-Tether Uas Leveraged For Nearly-Indefinite Meteorological Data Acquisition, Daniel Rico, Carrick Detweiler, Francisco Muñoz-Arriola

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in agriculture has risen in the past decade. These systems are key to modernizing agriculture. UASs collect and elucidate data previously difficult to obtain and used to help increase agricultural efficiency and production. Typical commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) UASs are limited by small payloads and short flight times. Such limits inhibit their ability to provide abundant data at multiple spatiotemporal scales. In this paper, we describe the design and construction of the tethered aircraft unmanned system (TAUS), which is a novel power-over-tether UAS leveraging the physical presence of the tether to launch multiple sensors along …

Aerodynamic And Aeroacoustic Performance Of Small Uav Propellers In Static Conditions, William Jordan, Robert W. Deters, Shreyas Narsipur

Publications

The proliferation of small multi-rotor UAVs in commercial, recreational, and surveillance spheres has garnered significant interest in the noise produced by these vehicles. The current research aims to study the relationship between the aerodynamic performance and acoustic characteristics of small-scale UAV propellers. Three commercially available propellers for the DJI Phantom 2/3 UAV were selected for preliminary development and validation of an aeroacoustic experimental test setup and associated data reduction methods. Propeller thrust, torque, and power measurements were recorded at static conditions. Upon successful validation of the test bench, acoustic measurements were taken at the propeller disk’s upstream and in-plane locations. …

Performance Testing Of Aero-Naut Camfolding Propellers, Or D. Dantsker, Robert W. Deters, Marco Caccamo, Michael S. Selig

Publications

The increase in popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been driven by their use in civilian, education, government, and military applications. However, limited on-board energy storage significantly limits flight time and ultimately usability. The propulsion system plays a critical part in the overall energy consumption of the UAV; therefore, it is necessary to determine the most optimal combination of possible propulsion system components for a given mission profile, i.e. propellers, motors, and electronic speed controllers (ESC). Hundreds of options are available for the different components with little performance specifications available for most of them. By examining a variety of …

Design And Test Of An Autonomy Monitoring Service To Detect Divergent Behaviors On Unmanned Aerial Systems, Loay Y. Almannaei

Theses and Dissertations

Operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) support many critical missions in the United State Air Force (USAF). Monitoring abnormal behavior is one of many responsibilities of the operator during a mission. Some behaviors are hard to be detect by an operator, especially when flying one or more autonomous vehicles; as such, detections require a high level of attention and focus to flight parameters. In this research, a monitoring system and its algorithm are designed and tested for a target fixed-wing UAV. The Autonomy Monitoring Service (AMS) compares the real vehicle or simulated Vehicle with a similar simulated vehicle using Software …

Conceptual Design Of A South Pole Carrier Pigeon Uav, Kendrick M. Dlima

Master's Theses

Currently, the South Pole has a large data problem. It is estimated that 1.2 TB of data is being produced every day, but less than 500 GB of that data is being uploaded via aging satellites to researchers in other parts of the world. This requires those at the South Pole to analyze the data and carefully select the parts to send, possibly missing out on vital scientific information. The South Pole Carrier Pigeon will look to bridge this data gap.

The Carrier Pigeon will be a small unmanned aerial vehicle that will carry a 30 TB solid-state hard drive …

Urban Cargo Transport Uav Final Design Review, Niko Giannakakos, Rafael Barreto Gutierrez, Tejas Bhavsar

Senior Design Project For Engineers

Delivery of goods to homes and offices over the last decades has seen a significant increase as more people and businesses need or want items sent directly to them. With the increase in demand, technology has also experienced a rapid growth, specifically in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Many major companies are currently researching UAVs as the future of their delivery operations. With this ever-growing demand, NASA has issued a design competition of a UAV developed for urban deliveries. This unmanned aircraft system (UAS) would need to be able to deliver small packages, in a timely manner, within …

Active Fault-Tolerance Of The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Automatic Control Systems, Vuong Anh Trung, Nguyen Van Thinh, Nguyen Duc Thanh, Nguyen Quang Vinh, Tran Thuan Hoang

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

This paper presents an introductory overview of principles of the three-layer hierarchy of active fault-tolerance, providing, determination of the fault type with as many details as enough to get recoverable fault reason and failure toleration by flexible redundancy using; the conception of active fault-tolerant control in abnormal modes is described. Developed models and methods of a systematic approach to fault tolerance in the direction of the effective use of the signal, parametric and structural redundancies and selection of parrying tools. Performed experimental researches of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) automatic control systems (ACS).

Backstepping Approach For Design Of Cascaded Pid Controller With Guaranteed Trajectory Tracking Performance For Micro-Air Uav, Yusuf Kartal

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses

Flight controllers for micro-air UAVs are generally designed using Proportional- Integral-Derivative (PID) methods, where the tuning of gains is difficult and time-consuming, and performance is not guaranteed. In this thesis, we develop a rigorous method based on the sliding mode analysis and nonlinear backstepping to design a PID controller with guaranteed performance. This technique provides the structure and gains for the PID controller, such that a robust and fast response of the UAV for trajectory tracking is achieved. First, the second-order sliding variable errors are used in a rigorous nonlinear backstepping design to obtain guaranteed performance for the nonlinear UAV …

Development Of A Tailored Flight Test Approach For Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Neil A. Wolfe

Master's Theses

This document contains the details of a study conducted to determine an effective performance flight test approach specifically for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS). This was done by taking proven procedures and documentation from the FAA and the Air Force for manned aircraft and tailoring them specifically for use with sUAS flight test programs. A ‘sUAS Flight Testing Handbook’ was created from the proceedings to aid commercial organizations and recreational developers conducting sUAS research without access to flight test experience. A performance flight test program was conducted with the AeroVironment RQ-20 Puma sUAS using the developed approach to verify that …

Propulsion System Testing For A Long-Endurance Solar-Powered Unmanned Aircraft, D. Dantsker, Robert Deters, Marco Caccamo

Publications

The increase in popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been driven by their use in civilian, education, government, and military applications. However, limited on-board energy storage significantly limits flight time and ultimately usability. The propulsion system plays a critical part in the overall energy consumption of the UAV; therefore, it is necessary to determine the most optimal combination of possible propulsion system components for a given mission profile, i.e. propellers, motors, and electronic speed controllers (ESC). Hundreds of options are available for the different components with little performance specifications available for most of them. In order to determine the …