This video paper outlines some of the results achieved during the first two years of the ongoing European project AIRobots (Innovative Aerial Service Robots for Remote Inspection by Contact, www.airobots.eu). Goal of AIRobots is to develop a new generation of aerial service robots capable of supporting human beings in all those activities that require the ability to interact actively and safely with environments not constrained on ground but, indeed, airborne. The flight tests presented in the video show the capabilities of the prototypes developed in the project to accomplish tasks including 3D environmental reconstruction using stereo vision, obstacle avoidance and remote manipulation by means of an onboard robotic arm.

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This paper presents a novel approach to the longitudinal guidance and control issue for an aircraft in presence of wind shear. The main contribution concerns the adaptive estimation of the wind shear disturbances affecting the aircraft and the development of a control scheme suitable to compensate these effects during a precision approach procedure. The work proposes the design, based on the Nonlinear Geometric Approach, of three adaptive filters providing the estimate of the wind shear disturbance components. These estimates are exploited, in an original way, by a BackStepping based controller, thus resulting in an Adaptive BackStepping Controller. Simulation results, obtained by means of a detailed flight simulator implementing the real wind shear condition which caused the 1975 crash of Eastern Flight 066 at JFK airport and a Montecarlo robustness test, demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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