Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have seen unprecedented levels of growth in military and civilian application domains. Fixed-wing aircraft, heavier or lighter than air, rotary-wing (rotorcraft, helicopters), vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned vehicles are being increasingly used in military and civilian domains for surveillance, reconnaissance, mapping, cartography, border patrol, inspection, homeland security, search and rescue, fire detection, agricultural imaging, traffic monitoring, to name just a few application domains. When initially introduced during World War I, UAVs were criticized heavily as being unreliable and inaccurate, and only a handful of people recognized at that early stage their potential and (future) impact on cha- ing the battlefield. To nobody's surprise, about a century later, the total market for UAVs will reach within a few years more than $16 billion, with the US Depa- ment of Defense (DOD) being the champion in funding initiatives, - search and development, as well as procurement. Europe, as a continent, is a very distant second player, expected to spend about 2 billion in research and development, and procurement.

The only book that brings together reported research from leading research groups in the field Offers state of the art research results Presents advances in the field Focuses on autonomous navigation

Inhalt
Background Information.- A Historical Perspective on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.- Modeling and Control Fundamentals.- Airplane Basic Equations of Motion and Open-Loop Dynamics.- Control Fundamentals of Small / Miniature Helicopters - A Survey.- A Tutorial Approach to Small Unmanned Helicopter Controller Design for Non-aggressive Flights.- Design and Control of a Miniature Quadrotor.- Navigation Aspects.- Obstacle and Terrain Avoidance for Miniature Aerial Vehicles.- Vision Based Navigation and Target Tracking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.- Single and Multi-UAV Relative Position Estimation Based on Natural Landmarks.- Evolutionary Algorithm Based Path Planning for Multiple UAV Cooperation.- Applications.- Robust Nonlinear Observers for Attitude Estimation of Mini UAVs.- Autonomous Solar UAV for Sustainable Flights.- The Integration of a Multimodal MAV and Biomimetic Sensing for Autonomous Flights in Near-Earth Environments.- Dynamic Localization of Air-Ground Wireless Sensor Networks.- Decentralized Formation Tracking of Multi-Vehicle Systems with Consensus-Based Controllers.- Hardware in the Loop Tuning for a Volcanic Gas Sampling UAV.- A Modular On-board Processing System for Small Unmanned Vehicles.- Epilogue.- Conclusions and the Road Ahead.