Recent Developments in Aerial Robotics: A Survey and Prototypes Overview

Abstract

In recent years, research and development in aerial robotics (i.e., unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs) has been growing at an unprecedented speed, and there is a need to summarize the background, latest developments, and trends of UAV research. Along with a general overview on the definition, types, categories, and topics of UAV, this work describes a systematic way to identify 1,318 high-quality UAV papers from more than thirty thousand that have been appeared in the top journals and conferences. On top of that, we provide a bird's-eye view of UAV research since 2001 by summarizing various statistical information, such as the year, type, and topic distribution of the UAV papers. We make our survey list public and believe that the list can not only help researchers identify, study, and compare their work, but is also useful for understanding research trends in the field. From our survey results, we find there are many types of UAV, and to the best of our knowledge, no literature has attempted to summarize all types in one place. With our survey list, we explain the types within our survey and outline the recent progress of each. We believe this summary can enhance readers' understanding on the UAVs and inspire researchers to propose new methods and new applications.Index Terms-Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), unmanned aircraft system (UAS), micro aerial vehicle (MAV), aerial robotics, flying robots, drone, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (VTOL). I. INTRODUCTIONU NMANNED aerial vehicle (UAV) research and development has been growing rapidly over the past decade. In academia, there are more than 60 UAV papers in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) and IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in 2016 alone. In the commercial sector, the annual Aerospace Forecast Report [1] released by the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates that more than seven million UAVs will be purchased by 2020. Another recent report [2] released by Pricewaterhouse-Coopers (PwC)-the second largest professional services firm in the world-estimates the global market for applications of UAVs at over $127 billion in 2020.Despite rapid growth, there is no survey paper that summarizes the background, latest developments, and trends of the UAV research. And, because the number of UAV papers has grown rapidly in recent years, researchers often find it hard to

CrazyKhoreia, a robotic perception system for UAV path planning from digital images

“…An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, also known as a UAV or drone, is an aircraft that, depending on its degree of autonomy, can perform tasks with restricted or no human intervention [3]. Its degree of autonomy directly depends on the sensors, perception, decision making and control features the UAV has.…”

UAV Optimal Guidance in Wind Fields Using ZEM/ZEV with Generalized Performance Index

“…In the last decade there has been a growing interest in the development of Flight Management Systems (FMS) for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), with special emphasis on task and path planning, as well as optimal guidance [1], [2], [3]. In a top-down layer view, a UAV flight management system usually consists of the mission planning, the path planning and the guidance system [4].…”

“…If on one hand, the wind can affect the UAV maneuvering capabilities (such as the minimum turning radius), on the other hand, it may also help to save energy [25] by flying in the wind direction. A number of researchers have investigated the problem of guidance in the presence of wind [2], [7], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31]. However, most articles in the open literature are focused on minimum-time problems, usually under constant airspeed, and an analytical "time-energy" optimal solution for the rendez-vous/intercept problem is hard to find.…”

Nonlinear Control of Quadcopters via Approximate Dynamic Programming

“…Due to their inherent instability and ease of design, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have widely been used as a test bench for control and robotics research, [14]. In [15], nonlinear MPC is used to control the fast attitude dynamics of a hexacopter vehicle, and a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) is used for the slower position dynamics.…”