Wilderness search and rescue entails performing a wide-range of work in complex environments and large regions. Given the concerns inherent in large regions due to limited rescue distribution, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based frameworks are a promising platform for providing aerial imaging. In recent years, technological advances in areas such as micro-technology, sensors and navigation have influenced the various applications of UAVs. In this study, an all-in-one camera-based target detection and positioning system is developed and integrated into a fully autonomous fixed-wing UAV. The system presented in this paper is capable of on-board, real-time target identification, post-target identification and location and aerial image collection for further mapping applications. Its performance is examined using several simulated search and rescue missions, and the test results demonstrate its reliability and efficiency.

This paper presents a model predictive controller (MPC) for position control of a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in hover flight. A ‘cross’ configuration quad-rotor tail-sitter UAV is designed with the capabilities for both hover and high efficiency level flight. The six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) nonlinear dynamic model of the UAV is built based on aerodynamic data obtained from wind tunnel experiments. The model predictive position controller is then developed with the augmented linearized state-space model. Measured and unmeasured disturbance model are introduced into the modeling and optimization process to improve disturbance rejection ability. The MPC controller is first verified and tuned in the hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulation environment and then implemented in an on-board flight computer for real-time indoor experiments. The simulation and experimental results show that the proposed MPC position controller has good trajectory tracking performance and robust position holding capability under the conditions of prevailing and gusty winds.

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Operations in extreme and hostile environments, such as offshore oil and gas production, nuclear decommissioning, nuclear facility maintenance, deep mining, space exploration, and subsea applications, require the execution of sophisticated tasks. In nuclear environments, robotic systems have advanced significantly over the past years but still suffer from task failures caused by informational and physical uncertainty of the highly unstructured nature of the environment and exasperated by the time constraints imposed by high radiation levels. Herein, a survey is presented of current robotic systems that can operate in such extreme environments and offer a novel approach to solving the challenges they impose, encapsulated by the mission statement of providing structure in unstructured environments and exemplified by a new self‐assembling modular robotic system, the Connect‐R.