\\ ---- Unmanned Aircraft Systems: Challenges in Design for Autonomy and Integration into the National Airspace
by K. Valavanis ---- \\ 09:00-10:00 -- Monday November 23, 2015 -- Room T1 \\ ABSTRACT

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have seen unprecedented levels of growth during the last decade, with even more expectations for future utilization in a very wide spectrum of applications, both military and civilian. However, focusing on the civilian use of UAS, and before ‘our pizzas are delivered from the sky’ and ‘our packages are dropped in our front door from quadrotors’ it is essential that R&D at least in the areas of design for autonomy, navigation, robust and fault-tolerant control, sense-detect-and-avoid/see-and-avoid systems for mid-air collision avoidance, UAV safety and reliability, reaches levels that are ‘acceptable’ by the civilian authorities (i.e., FAA, ICAO, etc.) before complete UAS integration into the national airspace system occurs.

This talk focuses at first on the design for autonomy, the transition from the ‘human-in-the-loop’ to the ‘human-on-the-loop’ concept that is coupled with the much needed reduced operator workload, followed by a comprehensive and modular UAS control architecture aiming at facilitating software developments regardless of specific hardware. This is followed by a generalized framework for (nonlinear, linearized and linear) controller design for unmanned rotorcraft – extendable to fixed wing UAVs - including a methodology to accommodate in real-time rotorcraft main/tail rotor failures resulting in helicopter safe landing. A scalable sense-detect-and-avoid system (SDAA) is also presented based on a combination of long- / short- range radar sensors, which is capable of simultaneously detecting and identifying multiple threats. This is patented technology that has been licensed for evaluation purposes.

Moving forward, and considering that Personal Air Vehicles (PAVs) is not such an ‘unthinkable’ goal, an integrated methodology to build and test Circulation Control Based fixed wing UAVs is presented, which allows for enhanced performance and increased payload during cruise flight. \\
Dr. Kimon P. Valavanis, Fellow, AAAS

John Evans Professor and Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Director, DU Unmanned Systems Research Institute (DU2SRI)
Daniel Felix Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science
University of Denver, Denver, CO 80208
Kimon.Valavanis@du.edu
\\ \\ ---- Biography \\ Dr. Kimon P. Valavanis is John Evans Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Denver. He is also the Founding Director of the DU Unmanned Systems Research Institute (DU2SRI). His research interests are focused in the areas of Unmanned Systems, Distributed Intelligence Systems, Robotics and Automation. He has published close to 400 book chapters, journal/transaction, referred conference papers, invited papers and technical reports, including 16 books. His latest work is the five volume Handbook on UAVs (co-editors with G. J. Vachtsevanos), published by Springer in August of 2014. Since 2006, he is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems. He has organized and has served in Organizing Committees of international conferences (IEEE CDC, ICRA, MSC, MED, ICUAS) for more than 20 years. In 1998, he was elected as Vice President – Administration of the IEEE Mediterranean Control Association (MCA). He was a Distinguished Speaker in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (- 2003), a Senior Member of IEEE and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a Fulbright Scholar. ---- \\ \\ \\ \\