System Identification I

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly across many civil application domains, including real-time monitoring, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. Smart UAVs are the next big revolution in the UAV technology promising to provide new opportunities in different applications, especially in civil infrastructure in terms of reduced risks and lower cost. Civil infrastructure is expected to dominate more than $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. In this paper, we present UAV civil applications and their challenges. We also discuss the current research trends and provide future insights for potential UAV uses. Furthermore, we present the key challenges for UAV civil applications, including charging challenges, collision avoidance and swarming challenges, and networking and security-related challenges. Based on our review of the recent literature, we discuss open research challenges and draw high-level insights on how these challenges might be approached.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges

The Architecture Of Cognition

Haptic perception plays a very important role in surgery. It enables the surgeon to feel organic tissue hardness, measure tissue properties, evaluate anatomical structures, and allows him/her to commit appropriate force control actions for safe tissue manipulation. However, in minimally invasive surgery, the surgeon's ability of perceiving valuable haptic information through surgical instruments is severely impaired. Performing the surgery without such sensory information could lead to increase of tissue trauma and vital organic tissue damage. In order to restore the surgeon's perceptual capability, methods of force and tactile sensing have been applied with attempts to develop instruments that can be used to detect tissue contact forces and generate haptic feedback to the surgeon. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in force and tactile sensing technologies applied in minimally invasive surgery. Several sensing strategies including displacement-based, current-based, pressure-based, resistive-based, capacitive-based, piezoelectric-based, vibration-based, and optical-based sensing are discussed.

State-of-the-Art in Force and Tactile Sensing for Minimally Invasive Surgery

https://iris.unito.it/bitstream/2318/1695314/1/HE-S-18-04814-final.pdf

Application of Hydrides in Hydrogen Storage and Compression: Achievements, Outlook and Perspectives

A three-term backpropagation algorithm

Rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the ability to operate in confined spaces and to hover over point of interest, but they have limited flight time and endurance. Conventional contact-based charging system for UAVs has been used, but it requires high landing accuracy for proper docking. Instead of the conventional system, autonomous wireless battery charging system for UAVs in outdoor conditions is proposed in this paper. UAVs can be wirelessly charged using the proposed charging system, regardless of yaw angle between UAVs and wireless charging pad, which can further reduce their control complexity for autonomous landing. The increased overall mission time eventually relaxes the limitations on payload and flight time. In this paper, a cost effective automatic recharging solution for UAVs in outdoor environments is proposed using wireless power transfer (WPT). This research proposes a global positioning system (GPS) and vision-based closed-loop target detection and a tracking system for precise landing of quadcopters in outdoor environments. The system uses the onboard camera to detect the shape, color and position of the defined target in image frame. Based on the offset of the target from the center of the image frame, control commands are generated to track and maintain the center position. Commercially available AR.Drone. was used to demonstrate the proposed concept which is equppied with bottom camera and GPS. Experiments and analyses showed good performance, and about 75% average WPT efficiency was achieved in this research.

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/6/803/pdf

Autonomous Wireless Self-Charging for Multi-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a game changing production technology for aerospace applications. Fused deposition modeling is one of the most widely used AM technologies and recently has gained much attention in the advancement of many products. This paper introduces an extensive review of fused deposition modeling and its application in the development of high performance unmanned aerial vehicles. The process methodology, materials, post processing, and properties of its products are discussed in details. Successful examples of using this technology for making functional, lightweight, and high endurance unmanned aerial vehicles are also highlighted. In addition, major opportunities, limitations, and outlook of fused deposition modeling are also explored. The paper shows that the emerge of fused deposition modeling as a robust technique for unmanned aerial vehicles represents a good opportunity to produce compact, strong, lightweight structures, and functional parts with embedded electronic.

/pdf/fused-deposition-modeling-for-unmanned-aerial-vehicles-uavs-1kyvd34gb2.pdf

Fused Deposition Modeling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Review

There has been an increasing interest in researching, developing and deploying multi-robot systems. This has been driven mainly by: the maturity of the practical deployment of a single-robot system and its ability to solve some of the most challenging tasks. Coverage path planning (CPP) is one of the active research topics that could benefit greatly from multi-robot systems. In this paper, we surveyed the research topics related to multi-robot CPP for the purpose of mapping and model reconstructions. We classified the topics into: viewpoints generation approaches; coverage planning strategies; coordination and decision-making processes; communication mechanism and mapping approaches. This paper provides a detailed analysis and comparison of the recent research work in this area, and concludes with a critical analysis of the field, and future research perspectives.

/pdf/a-survey-on-multi-robot-coverage-path-planning-for-model-21ktsluvaj.pdf

A survey on multi-robot coverage path planning for model reconstruction and mapping

A system and method to control the stability and direction of a quad tilt vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) by manipulating the rotational speed of propellers at each rotor while simultaneously tilting the rotors in a 45 degree configuration related to a central axis for directional control. Each rotor is attached to a tilting mechanism configured to be symmetrically aligned at a 45 degree angle from a central axis to manipulate a directional angle of each rotor along a first and second axis. The first and fourth rotors are aligned on the first axis while the second and third rotors are aligned on the second axis. A controller includes a first control loop for manipulating the rotational speed of the propellers to control the aircraft balance and a second control loop for controlling lateral movement by tilting the rotors along the first and second axis.

Yahya Zweiri

Papers

A three-term backpropagation algorithm

Autonomous Wireless Self-Charging for Multi-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Fused Deposition Modeling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Review

A survey on multi-robot coverage path planning for model reconstruction and mapping

Quad tilt rotor vertical take off and landing (vtol) unmanned aerial vehicle (uav) with 45 degree rotors