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Engineering Commons

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Mechanical Engineering

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Brigham Young University

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2001

Unmanned aircraft

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Spline Based Path Planning For Unmanned Air Vehicles, Kevin B. Judd, Timothy W. Mclain Aug 2001

Spline Based Path Planning For Unmanned Air Vehicles, Kevin B. Judd, Timothy W. Mclain

Faculty Publications

A trajectory planning scheme that generates feasible flight routes for an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) is developed. A preliminary path is generated from a Voronoi diagram based on threat locations. This path consists of a series of straight-line segments that cannot be followed exactly by the UAV. Using a series of cubic splines to connect these straight-line segments, this path is refined into an optimum path that is flyable by the UAV. Utilizing a decomposition strategy, both the full path (coarse detail) to the target and the proximate optimum path (fine detail) near the UAV can be quickly computed. The …


Cooperative Control Of Uav Rendezvous, Timothy W. Mclain, Phillip R. Chandler, Steven Rasmussen, Meir Pachter Jun 2001

Cooperative Control Of Uav Rendezvous, Timothy W. Mclain, Phillip R. Chandler, Steven Rasmussen, Meir Pachter

Faculty Publications

The cooperative control of timing and synchronization of tasks of multiple unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) represents a valuable capability for a wide range of potential multi-UAV missions. This research addresses the specific problem of cooperative rendezvous in which multiple UAVs are to arrive at their targets simultaneously. The development of a rendezvous manager state machine and a cooperative control decomposition approach are described. Simulation results demonstrating the feasibility of the approach are presented.