Advanced Research with Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research has shown rapid development in recent years and offers a great number of research challenges for artificial intelligence and knowledge representation. Much previous research has focused on low-level control capability with the goal of developing controllers which support the autonomous flight of a UAV from one way-point to another. The most common type of mission scenario involves placing sensor payloads in position for data collection tasks where the data is eventually processed off-line or in real-time by ground personnel. Use of UAVs and mission tasks such as these have become increasingly more important in recent conflict situations and are predicted to play increasingly more important roles in any future conflicts.