The development of Flight Control Systems (FCS) coupled with the availability of other Commercial Off-The Shelf (COTS) components is enabling the introduction of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the civil market. UAS have great potential to be used in a wide variety of civil applications such as environmental applications, emergency situations, surveillance tasks and more. In general, they are specially well suited for the so-called D-cube operations (Dirty, Dull or Dangerous). Current technology greatly facilitates the construction of UAS. Sophisticated flight control systems also make them accessible to end users with little aeronautical expertise. However, we believe that for its successful introduction into the civil market, progress needs to be made to deliver systems able to perform a wide variety of missions with minimal reconfiguration and with reduced operational costs. Most current flight plan specification mechanisms consist in a simple list of waypoints, an approach that has important limitations. This paper proposes a new specification mechanism with semantically richer constructs that will enable the end user to specify more complex flight plans. The proposed formalism provides means for specifying iterative behavior, conditional branching and other constructs to dynamically adapt the flight path to mission circumstances. Collaborating with the FCS, a new module on-board the UAS will be in charge of executing these plans. The paper also presents a prototype implementation of this module and the results obtained in simulations.

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Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are slowing becoming efficient platforms that can be applied in scientific/commercial remote sensing applications. UAS may offer interesting benefits in terms of cost, flexibility, endurance, etc. On the other side, the complexity of developing a full UAS-system is currently limiting its practical application. Currently, only large organizations like NASA or NOAA have enough budget and infrastructure to develop such applications.Nowadays, UAS technology offers feasible technical solutions for airframes, flight control, communications, and a wide set of multi-spectrum sensors. However, the generalized development of remote sensing applications are still limited by the absence of systems that support the development of the actual UAS sensing mission.This paper introduces a flexible and reusable hardware/software architecture designed to facilitate the development of UAS-based remote sensing applications. This flexibility is organized into an user-parameterizable UAS Service Abstraction Layer (USAL). The USAL defines a collection of standard services are their interrelations as a basic starting point for further development by users. Functionalities like enhanced flight-plans, a mission control engine, data storage, communications management, etc. are offered. Additional services can be included according to requirements but all existing services and inter-service communication infrastructure can be exploited and tailored to specific needs. The overall USAL architecture is demonstrated by means of a wild land fire remote sensing application currently being developed to support fire fighters in the Mediterranean area.