Best of Both Worlds

With the development of technologies related to unmanned vehicles, including unmanned aerial vehicle and unmanned surface vehicle, unmanned vehicles play a pivotal role in maritime management and cruise activities. Meanwhile, lots of evidence shows that a single unmanned vehicle is not qualified for operation under complex environment, whereas the unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation consists of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned surface vehicles, which can enhance the performance of the single unmanned vehicle significantly. However, the cooperative operation performance of the unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation is constrained by its communication capacity. Consequently, a cooperative communication framework is designed for the unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation. A distributed dynamic network topology is constructed for fulfilling effective communication for the unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation based on ad hoc network. Experiments are carried out by employing the built unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation platform. Results verify the superiority of the designed cooperative communication framework for the unmanned aerial vehicle–unmanned surface vehicle formation.

The nature and peculiarities of formation of risks of economic activity of enterprise are researched. Expediency of application of instruments of adaptive risk management of economic activity of enterprise on the basis of use of the situational approach and study of the risk management system in dynamics is substantiated. A model of adaptive risk management of economic activity of enterprise on the basis of precedents has been formed, which includes subsystems of active and reactive risk management. Important components of influence on the adaptive management system are the current risk situation caused by the existing risk factors, the dynamics of risk factors development and the strategy of risk management of economic activity adopted by the enterprise, which defines the targets, priorities and prerequisites for making adaptive management decisions at the enterprise in the face of risk. The accumulation of information about the object of management within this model allows developing optimal management decisions, accumulating information about adaptive decisions in the Bank of precedents of management decisions and using them as a template for making management decisions in similar (typical) situations. It is substantiated that an important feature of the development of the system of adaptive management of economic risks at enterprise is the presence of a certain direction of transformation - the vector of development of the adaptive management system. A vector model of adaptive transformation of the risk management system at enterprise has been proposed, which contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the process of development of the system of adaptive risk management of economic activity of enterprise. Building a model of risk management at enterprise on the basis of precedents, taking into account the vector nature of its development, will contribute to a holistic understanding of the patterns of formation and transformation of the system of adaptive risk management of economic activity at enterprise. The study substantiates the feasibility of using an adaptive approach in the system of enterprise economic risk management, which is considered as a flexible open system capable of self-learning and progressive development. The use of precedents for making adaptive management decisions increases the system's ability to self-develop and more effectively adapt to the changing conditions of the external and internal environment of the enterprise.

Military-industrial complexes of many countries have invested billions of dollars in the industry over 120 years of development and have achieved significant progresses in the creation of surface, water and underwater equipment. Groups of military unmanned vehicles include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), deck-based UAVs, water, underwater and hybrid unmanned vehicles (UAVs). Their purpose is intelligence, surveillance, strategic research projects, and military transport purposes. As for the civilian use of unmanned vehicles, this is a young industry, it is 15 years old. The beginning of the era of non-military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and then unmanned floating vehicles (UAVs) is considered to be 2006, when the US Federal Aviation Administration allowed the flights of small custom drones. At the same time, they were given a definition: a device that is remotely controlled by an operator; a device that moves along a pre-planned route. Unmanned vehicles the use of which for the purposes of the forest complex of our country is carried out or is planned to begin in the near future must meet some special requirements that are discussed in this article.

: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are critical components of the future naval forces. UAV control and monitoring with autonomous operation will become an absolute necessity and adaptive cooperation of vehicles is the only practical alternative. The objective of this project is to develop and evaluate new methodologies for cooperative (formation) control of multiple unmanned air vehicles. The goal is to have multiple UAVs working together as a group. Instead of separately assigning distinct tasks to each vehicle, the operator would assign tasks to the UAV group, which then determines the best way to accomplish each task, freeing the operator to maintain surveillance over the entire operation. In this project we investigated Path Tracking and obstacle avoidance of UAVs using fuzzy logic method. Algorithms for close formation control of multi-UAVs are developed and simulated. We also investigated fault-tolerant control of single UAVs by neuro-adaptive method. Detailed description of this method is provided in this document. The project has supported S graduate students with 9 technical papers published.

Designing and building of the unmanned aircraft, especially light and ultra light vehicles, is mainly performed using the experience gained when constructing the flying models. There have not been uniform principles of building and exploiting of the mini and micro UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) in the form of regulations similar to those for manned airplanes. The unmanned vehicles of these classes in terms of their abilities and attractive price are more frequently exploited using the same air area as manned airplanes performing missions over the inhabited areas. An urgent necessity arises to work out the norms of flight suitability of the mini and micro unmanned aerial vehicles. The work contains the analysis of suitability of the current aviation regulations to determine the requirements for the mini unmanned vehicles. The work concentrates on the phenomenon of determining the symmetrical loads from the maneuvers and the turbulence atmosphere. The result of this analysis is the Limit Maneuver Envelope, Limit Gust Envelope and Limit Combined Envelope for mini UAV. The analyzed flight states allowed selecting the so called design cases which can become a basis for determining the norms of loading of mini unmanned aerial vehicles which can constitute the beginning of the regulations for building of the unmanned aerial vehicles of this class.

Heterogeneous unmanned ground vehicle-unmanned aerial vehicle (UGV-UAV) collaborative systems offer clear advantages for field exploration. However, when tethered unmanned aerial vehicles (TUAVs) are introduced to extend mission capability, a major compatibility gap emerges for small and highly maneuverable UGVs: existing industrial tethered ground stations are generally too heavy and bulky to be carried by such platforms. In addition, on unstructured ground, residual station tilt can significantly complicate UAV launch and recovery. To address these issues, this paper develops an ultralight vehicle-mounted tethered ground station for micro unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAVs) that can be integrated directly with small UGVs. Through co-design of a 2-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) self-leveling launch platform and a passive tether-assisted recovery scheme without visual fiducials, in which a customized UAV flight-control loop is coordinated with the state transitions of the ground tether-management system, the proposed system achieves practical tether-assisted recovery. Experiments show that the complete platform weighs only 4.1 kg and that the self-leveling mechanism compensates for ground inclinations over a total range of 24 degrees. Repeated passive-landing tests further demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed recovery scheme and its tolerance to moderate bay tilt and terminal off-axis activation. System-level flight validation confirms practical tether-assisted recovery without visual fiducials. In addition, we conduct a simplified exploratory simulation of tether-based ground-anchor localization under the proposed system architecture. Overall, these results establish a lightweight and low-cost hardware design and a practically viable recovery strategy for multimodal micro air-ground robotic systems.

This study examined the interactive effects of spatial ability and team process on operator workload, while using multiple unmanned vehicles. The hypotheses also focused on how these effects might change when using different measures of spatial ability. In order to examine this, the Guilford-Zimmerman Spatial Visualization and Spatial Orientation scores of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operator and navigation support provided by this UAV operator to an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) operator were used as variables predicting UGV operator workload while performing a reconnaissance task. Results indicated that the interaction of the “guider's” spatial visualization and navigation support and the interaction between spatial orientation and navigation support not only accounted for unique variances in the prediction of his/her teammate's workload, but they also produced qualitatively different patterns of results. In identifying these unique contributions, the importance of using multiple spatial ability measures in (unmanned vehicle) research is highlighted.

The paper presents the analysis on stability of digital control system for unmanned vehicle with numerical analysis. The objective of this study is mainly emphasized on the fulfillment of the advanced control techniques according to the fundamental concepts of digital control system approaches for unmanned aerial vehicle system design. The targeted unmanned aerial vehicle system was designed based on the simple construction under the idea of fixed wing flight system approaches. The stability analyses on unmanned aerial vehicle are vital role to enhance the real world applications. The background concepts on digital control system for stability analysis on dynamic control system like unmanned aerial vehicle system. The appropriate controller design for dynamic control system of unmanned aerial vehicle is vital role to analyze the accurate stability condition for reality. The implementation of numerical analysis on compensator design has been developed by using MATLAB. The physical parameters in these analyses are based on the experimental outcomes from the recent research works in dynamical system implementations. The mathematical approaches are very helpful for numerical analysis on compensator design for the unmanned aerial vehicles schemes. The simulation results confirm that the high performance stability test on unmanned aerial vehicle system has been met with the theoretical works.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have quickly become one of the promising Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices for smart cities. Thanks to their mobility, agility, and onboard sensors’ customizability, UAVs have already demonstrated immense potential for numerous commercial applications. The UAVs expansion will come at the price of a dense, high-speed and dynamic traffic prone to UAVs going rogue or deployed with malicious intent. Counter UAV systems (C-UAS) are thus required to ensure their operations are safe. Existing C-UAS, which for the majority come from the military domain, lack scalability or induce collateral damages. This paper proposes a C-UAS able to intercept and escort intruders. It relies on an autonomous defense UAV swarm, capable of self-organizing their defense formation and to intercept the malicious UAV. This fully localized and GPS-free approach follows a modular design regarding the defense phases and it uses a newly developed balanced clustering to realize the intercept- and capture-formation. The resulting networked defense UAV swarm is resilient to communication losses. Finally, a prototype UAV simulator has been implemented. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the feasibility and performance of our approach.

Automated systems have been seamlessly integrated into several industries as part of their industrial automation processes. Employing automated systems, such as autonomous vehicles, allows industries to increase productivity, benefit from a wide range of technologies and capabilities, and improve workplace safety. So far, most of the existing systems consider utilizing one type of autonomous vehicle. In this work, we propose a collaboration of different types of unmanned vehicles in maritime offshore scenarios. Providing high capacity, extended coverage, and better quality of services, autonomous collaborative systems can enable emerging maritime use cases, such as remote monitoring and navigation assistance. Motivated by these potential benefits, we propose the deployment of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in an autonomous collaborative communication system. Specifically, we design high-speed, directional communication links between a terrestrial control station and the two unmanned vehicles. Using measurement and simulation results, we evaluate the performance of the designed links in different communication scenarios and we show the benefits of employing multiple autonomous vehicles in the proposed communication system.

Over the past few decades, the usage of unmanned vehicles has grown exponentially, expanding into applications such as the automation of industrial processes and automobiles. However, their utility has often been limited by operational concerns. Fully controlled unmanned vehicles require multiple human operators, while their fully autonomous counterparts lack the ability to handle the complex maneuvers necessary in natural disaster relief and/or search and rescue situations. Semi-autonomous UAVs offer a feasible compromise between the two extremes. In this scenario, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sends birds-eye images of the terrain beneath it to a computing cluster, which will identify easily traversable terrain and generate a path of least risk to an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). If the path's risk is below a certain threshold, then the UGV will be permitted to proceed on its own. Otherwise, a human operator will be notified, so that he or she may control the UGV directly until it exits the most dangerous terrain. This paradigm allows a single operator to manage several UAVs simultaneously.

Abstract: Geothermal power plants are designed for optimal utilization of geothermal resource. However, geothermal fields typically undergo significant changes in resource characteristics such as pressure, temperature and steam quality over their life span. With appropriate reservoir modelling it is possible to predict the future resource characteristics of a geothermal field to a reasonable degree of accuracy. We propose a new adaptive design approach that would allow geothermal power plants to take into account the change of resource characteristics that occur over a 30-40 years time horizon based on the results of reservoir modelling. Currently, it is difficult and expensive to modify or renovate an existing plant due to space constraints, piping arrangements, transportation of machinery etc. The adaptive design approach would allow cost effective modifications in operation and equipment to adjust to changes in resource characteristics in the future. A simple model for a typical combined cycle geothermal power plant is considered as a test case for the adaptive design approach. Simulation is carried out using changes in both wellhead specific enthalpy and mass flow rate. There are four case studies presented in this paper that analysed various possible options of the hypothetical power plant depending on the changes in resource characteristics. Taking into account the results of the simulation, alternative plant designs are presented and improvements in performance are discussed. Although, the initial investment cost might go up as a consequence of adaptive design, over the life span of the plant the total benefit may be greater.

The article discusses about the system of information support for unmanned ground vehicle and un-manned aerial vehicles with an increased degree of autonomy, arising application difficulties, is considered. Some methodological approaches to calculating the requirements of electronic protection for the data transmission systems of unmanned ground vehicle and unmanned aerial vehicles with an increased degree of autonomy are given.

Multi-agent hybrid social cognitive optimization (MAHSCO) based on the Internet of Things (IoT) is suggested to solve the problem of the generation of formations of unmanned vehicles. Through the analysis of the unmanned vehicle formation problem, formation principles, formation scale, unmanned vehicle formation safety distance, and formation evaluation indicators are taken into consideration. The application of the IoT enables the optimization of distributed computing. To ensure the reliability of the formation algorithm, the convergence of MAHSCO has been proved. Finally, computer simulation and actual unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation generation flight generating four typical formations are carried out. The result of the actual UAV formation generation flight is consistent with the simulation experiment, and the algorithm performs well. The MAHSCO algorithm based on the IoT is proved to be able to generate formations that meet the mission requirements quickly and accurately.

Introduction. Due to their unique properties, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in the civil and military sectors. Due to the growing demand for specialist UAV operators, there is an increasing need to assess the working conditions at the workplaces of UAV operators. At the same time, special attention is paid to the sanitary and hygienic control of microbial contamination of the controls of unmanned vehicles. The study aims to execute a microbiological assessment of the qualitative and quantitative composition of microorganisms polluting the controls of unmanned aerial vehicles in order to further develop preventive measures aimed at preventing the spread of infectious diseases among operators of unmanned aerial vehicles. Materials and methods. The study assessed the quantitative and qualitative composition of microorganisms on control panels, keyboards, video cameras and video helmets of operators of unmanned aerial vehicles using both personal and multi-user equipment. Results. As a result of the study of microbial contamination of control panels, keyboards, video glasses and video helmets of operators of unmanned aerial vehicles, it was found that when operating equipment in multiuser access mode, the level of microbial contamination increases 2.9 times compared with personal use. In the course of the study, experts identified and ranked the main types of microorganisms living on the surfaces of video glasses, video helmets, keyboards and control panels of operators of unmanned aerial vehicles, with the aim of further developing and improving measures to preserve and promote the health of the aforementioned specialists. Limitations. It is necessary to study the effectiveness and safety of various disinfection methods for materials (plastic, glass, rubber, etc.) used to create UAV controls. To date, the impact of the use of glasses and helmets on the visual organ of operators of unmanned aerial vehicles in the long term of their use in the professional activities of specialists has not been fully studied, which does not allow fully assess the risks to their health. It is necessary to develop new solutions to minimize the impact of adverse factors on the organ of vision, including microbiological ones, as well as to minimize the manifestations of conjunctival symptoms. Conclusion. Multiuser equipment is most susceptible to microbial contamination, which increases the risk of infectious and inflammatory diseases among UAV operators. When using glasses and helmets, there are more pronounced manifestations of conjunctival symptoms due to their closer location to the organ of vision and the presence of additional fans in their design. The spectral composition of microorganisms contaminating UAV controls is mainly represented by representatives of opportunistic flora. The leading reason for contamination of equipment by opportunistic and pathogenic microorganisms is the limitation of the ability of UAV operators to comply with personal hygiene rules and insufficient treatment of equipment with disinfectant solutions. Ethics. The study was approved at a meeting of the Independent Ethics Committee at the Kirov Military Medical Academy on December 17, 2024 (Protocol No. 297 dated December 17, 2024). The study was conducted in compliance with ethical principles and the voluntary consent of the participants.