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In this paper, results of the flight‐testing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight control system are presented. APC‐4 “SkyGuide” autonomous navigation and control system, designed and developed by the research team of the Department of Avionics and Control at Rzeszów University of Technology, has been tested. Properties of this flight control system, as well as selected results of the in‐flight tests conducted on board of the PZL‐110 “Koliber” aircraft, are presented. Results obtained confirm that design assumptions of the navigation and control system and research methodology have been appropriate and APC‐4 autopilot can be used on UAVs board.

The purpose of this paper is to present the development of hardware‐in‐the‐loop simulation (HILS) for visual target tracking of an octorotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with onboard computer vision.

HILS for visual target tracking of an octorotor UAV is developed by integrating real embedded computer vision hardware and camera to software simulation of the UAV dynamics, flight control and navigation systems run on Simulink. Visualization of the visual target tracking is developed using FlightGear. The computer vision system is used to recognize and track a moving target using feature correlation between captured scene images and object images stored in the database. Features of the captured images are extracted using speed‐up robust feature (SURF) algorithm, and subsequently matched with features extracted from object image using fast library for approximate nearest neighbor (FLANN) algorithm. Kalman filter is applied to predict the position of the moving target on image plane. The integrated HILS environment is developed to allow real‐time testing and evaluation of onboard embedded computer vision for UAV's visual target tracking.

Utilization of HILS is found to be useful in evaluating functionality and performance of the real machine vision software and hardware prior to its operation in a flight test. Integrating computer vision with UAV enables the construction of an unmanned system with the capability of tracking a moving object.

HILS for visual target tracking of UAV described in this paper could be applied in practice to minimize trial and error in various parameters tuning of the machine vision algorithm as well as of the autopilot and navigation system. It also could reduce development costs, in addition to reducing the risk of crashing the UAV in a flight test.

A HILS integrated environment for octorotor UAV's visual target tracking for real‐time testing and evaluation of onboard computer vision is proposed. Another contribution involves implementation of SURF, FLANN, and Kalman filter algorithms on an onboard embedded PC and its integration with navigation and flight control systems which enables the UAV to track a moving object.

APPLIED Technology, Middle East and European marketing and technical support representative of PF Industries Inc, will exhibit ground support equipment supplied to airlines worldwide.

The main targets of the work are analysis and simulation of flying laboratory performance. In particular, synthesis of control system for handling qualities change and evaluation in flight are taken into consideration.

Modification of handling qualities is obtained by applying indirect flight control system (FBW). The properties of the optimal controller are calculated through the indirect (implicit) model‐following method. In particular, the modified version based on the computer simulations is used.

Calculation and simulation concern the synthesis of desired handling qualities of the general aviation aircraft PZL‐M20 “Mewa” equipped with indirect (FBW) experimental flight control system. Results of the simulation show that the flying laboratory has the same properties as modeled aircraft, and it is possible to say that handling properties concern attitude orientation of the experimental aircraft is similar to modeled commuter aircraft.

The result of research can be implemented on a project of the flying laboratory based on general aviation aircraft PZL M20 “Mewa”.

The paper presents the practical approach for synthesis of the “Simplified total in flight simulator” performance which can be used for analysis of handling qualities of general aviation aircraft equipped with FBW. Research of this type focuses on military and transport airplanes however, there are no published works in the area of small aircraft so far.

EUROPEAN aerospace was well to the fore at the Show, with first appearances of the A320, Fokker 100 and BAe 146–300. Few large US aircraft were present although the executive jet market was well represented with products from both sides of the Atlantic. Potential developments were featured in many areas, all of which should be realised in the next few years. Progress of the flight trials of the Airbus Industrie A320 was detailed with three of the four aircraft in the programme now flying. The first of these is exploring all the critical flight conditions. The normal operating envelope was covered on the first flight; from 80 knots to 381 knots/0.89 M and a cg range up to 46% aft cg. Handling qualities have now been explored over the full flight envelope, with the protection devices working as predicted and buffet limits better than forecast. Major tasks have included stall identification and handling qualities at aft cg as well as flutter tests with and without the load alleviation function. The second A320 has the primary tasks of dealing with the development and checking of the systems, emphasis on the third is placed on flight control and computing and the fourth aircraft will be undertaking performance trials.

Smiths Industries is to supply the head‐up display system for the Sea Harrier. The company will design, develop and make the electronic head‐up display and weapon aiming computer system for the latest version of the HS Harrier which will operate from Royal Navy ships.

In the mid‐1990s Cranfield began work on a programme to develop a short‐range, unmanned air vehicle system for surveillance use. The basic aim of the work was to prove the technologies to provide real time reconnaissance imagery of ground targets to operators having the minimum of skills in air vehicle operations. Cranfield was able to bring a wide range of proven skills to the programme in the areas of airframe and control system design, mathematical modelling and real time simulation plus system integration and flight trials. All of these contributed to the work described here. The programme led to the demonstration of a complete “Observer” system, including the new Cranfield A3 air vehicle, which met the requirements for a robust, simple to operate system for providing the imagery information required without the need to master the complexities of the technologies deployed to provide it.

This paper aims to describe a novel hybrid inertial measurement unit (IMU) for motion capturing via a new configuration of strategically distributed inertial sensors, and a calibration approach for the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors mounted in a flight vehicle motion tracker built on the inertial navigation system.

The hybrid-IMU is designed with five accelerometers and one auxiliary gyroscope instead of the accelerometer and gyroscope triads in the conventional IMU.

Simulation studies for tracking with both attitude angles and translational movement of a flight vehicle are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The cross-quadratic terms of angular velocity are selected to process the direct measurements of angular velocities of body frame and to avoid the integration of angular acceleration vector compared with gyro-free configuration based on only accelerometers. The inertial sensors are selected from the commercial microelectromechanical system devices to realize its low-cost applications.

A conference with the above title was held recently by the Royal Institute of Navigation. It had as its secondary heading ‘Electronics in Navigation’ and this is really the key to the subject since without this there would be no CRT's or colour multi‐function or any other kind of generated displays. The conference covered a wide range of land, sea and airborne systems and details of those of particular interest to ‘Aircraft Engineering’ are included here. There must of course, be information providers and databases for these systems to function at all and early papers made particular references to various FLIP's (flight information publications) and met office services and the provision of digital geographic data. The Directorate of Military Survey has plans to develop and maintain a central geographic data base from which a range of products will be available; specifically for defence purposes to support mission planning, navigation, targetting and simulation, etc. In the civil field too, the present applications of electronic data services will be expanded and chart presentations of this type will become normal throughout the industry.

To provide a progress report into research conducted to establish guidelines for the development of guidance vision aids.

The first stage of the research is to establish a coherent engineering basis for the methods of (visual) motion perception and control to inform the design of pilot aids that will support flight in degraded visual conditions, particularly when close to the ground. The next stage will then be to construct and evaluate synthetic displays that recover the visual cues necessary to allow flight in degraded visual conditions for a range of manoeuvres using the flight simulation facilities at the University of Liverpool (UoL). The research is guided by tau (time to contact) theory from the field of ecological psychology.

The closure of spatial gaps for a number of aircraft manoeuvres are presented in the tau domain. Analysis of the landing flare manoeuvre suggest that both a constant rate of change of tau strategy and an intrinsic tau‐guidance strategy will yield benefits in terms of touchdown descent rate if presented as display symbology.

Results are presented from trials where only one professional pilot was used. Results from a wider population of pilots need to be analysed to ensure that the observed trends are generic.

The reported results are being used in the next phase of the research project to inform the design of a guidance vision‐aid for the flare manoeuvre. These displays will be tested in flight simulation trials.

The research takes a theory of motion perception and applies it to aircraft guidance display technology.