{"id":274,"date":"2021-01-21T03:39:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-21T02:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/?p=274"},"modified":"2023-08-11T16:25:04","modified_gmt":"2023-08-11T15:25:04","slug":"uavs-now-and-then","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/2021\/01\/21\/uavs-now-and-then\/","title":{"rendered":"UAVs Now and Then"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article has been published as part of Ch.1 of my PhD thesis<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

UAVs Then<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the Wright brothers did on the 17th of December 1903 was a stepping- stone for humanity in its quest to conquer the skies by \ufb02ying machines of their own creation. A quest that started hundreds of years before with many attempts of human-powered \ufb02ight mimicking the \ufb02apping-behavior of birds. After years full of trial, errors, and crashing bodies, humans converged to the solution of \ufb01xed-wing aircrafts for sustained \ufb02ight and not \ufb02apping-wing ones. Ever since the Wright Flyer (Fig. 1.1.a) \ufb02ew in 1903, \ufb01xed-wing aircrafts have evolved at a tremendous rate motivated, unfortunately, by its hostile capabilities. Only 11 years were enough for powered aircrafts to become an important branch of the armed forces in World War I. Although, aircrafts were used initially for reconnaissance only, by the end of the war armed air-forces included \ufb01ghter and bomber aircrafts as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Figure 1.1: Evolution of Fixed Wing UAVs: a. Wright Flyer (Public do- main), b. Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane (Public domain), c. MQ-9 Reaper (Credit: U.S. Air Force), d. AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven (Credit: U.S. Army), e. Parrot DISCO drone (CC-BY-2.0).
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The capabilities of aerial vehicles have triggered a massive amount of military funds to be allocated for the development of the technology which in turn accelerated the evolution of \ufb01xed-wing aircrafts. Such funds have allowed the increase of the maximum speed of these vehicles from 80 km\/h in the beginning of the war in 1914 to 240 km\/h at the end of the war in 1918 [Munson, 1969]. It is also remarkable that during this early development stage, the \ufb01rst autopilot controlled UAV (Fig. 1.1.b), designed by P.C. Hewitt and E. Sperry, made its \ufb01rst successful \ufb02ight on the 12th of September 1917 [Valavanis and Vachtsevanos, 2015].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most development e\ufb00orts were concentrated initially on \ufb01xed-wing aerial vehicles, which were the most suited for military purposes due to their high endurance and long-range capabilities. However, there were many appealing features in such vehicles such as vertical take-o\ufb00 and landing (VTOL), \ufb02ying at low altitudes, and hovering. This led to the advent of rotary-wing or multirotor aerial vehicles. The \ufb01rst successful \ufb02ight of a quad-rotor aircraft took place in the early 1920s by the de Bothezat helicopter (Fig. 1.2.a). Thirty nine years later, the \ufb01rst unmanned helicopter developed was the QH-50 DASH (Fig. 1.2.b), which demonstrated its \ufb01rst \ufb02ight in 1959 [Valavanis and Vachtsevanos, 2015].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The military development of \ufb01xed-wing and rotary-wing aerial vehicles, both manned and unmanned, continued for decades. Such development yielded a vast variety of designs at many scales. Moreover, the mathematical under- standing of the \ufb02ight dynamics and control of such vehicles evolved greatly in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Figure 1.2: Evolution of Rotary Wing UAVs: a. De Bothezat Helicopter (Pub- lic domain), b. Gyrodyne QH-50 DASH (Public domain), c. MQ-8 Fire Scout (CC BY-SA 2.5 nl), d. DJI Phantom 3 (Credit: Flickr\/Andri Koolme), e. Crazy\ufb02ie 2.1 (Public domain)
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

On the other hand, the development of \ufb02apping-wing aerial vehicles (aka ornithopters) was overshadowed by the success of \ufb01xed-wing and multirotor vehicles. Thus, \ufb02apping-wing aerial vehicles were abandoned for many years and considered a futureless technology due to its high complexity [Goodheart, 2011]. However, the old dream of \u201c\ufb02ying like the birds\u201d motivated a few individual visionaries to unlock the secrets of the \ufb02ight dynamics of birds and build \ufb02apping-wing aerial vehicles, but at a much slower pace compared to \ufb01xed-wing and multirotor vehicles. The \ufb01rst human-powered \ufb02apping-wing vehicle successfully \ufb02ew in 1929 as a result of the work of A. Lippish. Seventeen years later, in 1946, the \ufb01rst engine-powered \ufb02apping-\ufb02ight was achieved by A. Schmid (Fig. 1.3.a). Then after another fourty-\ufb01ve years, the \ufb01rst successful engine-powered small-scale \ufb02apping-wing UAV, known as \u201cMr. Bill\u201d (Fig. 1.3.b), was designed in September 1991 [Goodheart, 2011].<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 1.3: Evolution of Flapping Wing UAVs: a. Schmid 1942 Ornithopter (Public domain), b. Mr. Bill\u2019s \ufb01rst launch (Credit: Project Ornithopter), c. Robird (Credit: Clear Flight Solutions), d. AeroVironment Nano Humming- bird (Public domain), e. RoboBee (Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University)
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

UAVs Now<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nowadays UAVs have come a very long way in becoming smaller, cheaper, smarter, and closer to people. The advancements in the \ufb01elds of miniaturized sensors, microprocessors, electric drives, and batteries have allowed the down- scaling of UAVs to a great extent and simultaneously with lower costs. Moreover, the advancement in robotic technologies have allowed the development of advanced UAVs with perception, planning, and decision making capabilities, that allowed them to accomplish complicated tasks autonomously. The combination of UAVs and robotic technologies gave rise to the \ufb01eld of aerial robotics<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The small scale and low cost of current aerial robots have been primary factors that enabled aerial robots to gain unprecedented notability in the civilian market. Historically military applications have been the main driving force for the development of UAV technologies. However, nowadays the market share of civil applications is increasing at a very high pace. According to Finnegan [2019], the commercial unmanned aerial systems (which includes UAVs and their auxiliary equipment) market is expected to increase from $5 billion in 2019 to $14.5 billion in 2028. In addition, UAVs are allowing for commercial services and solutions that are estimated to potentially have a market value of over $127 billion [Mazur and Wi\u00b4sniewski, 2016]. These market predictions, and others, imply that civilian applications are becoming an equally important driving force, if not more, for the development of UAV technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Multi-rotor aerial robots have gained more popularity in civilian applications as well as academic research compared to \ufb01xed-wing ones. This can be contributed to their lower cost, versatility, portability and most importantly its hovering and VTOL capabilities. With the wide variety of sensors that could be mounted onboard, aerial robots enabled many companies to o\ufb00er cost e\ufb00ective solutions for various civilian applications such as surveillance, visual inspection, aerial photography, search and rescue, mapping, entertainment, and law enforcement, just to mention a few.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, there has been also an increasing interest in small-scale \ufb02apping-wing UAVs in academic research groups and civilian companies. One factor that helped revive interest in this class of aerial vehicles was their aerodynamic properties at very small scales. The e\ufb03cient operation of these vehicles at low Reynolds numbers has motivated the development of insect-like micro UAVs such as the RobobBee [Ja\ufb00eris et al., 2019] as well as hummingbird-like UAVs such as the AeroVironment Nano Hummingbird [Keennon et al., 2012], shown in Fig. 1.3. The natural appearance of bird-like aerial robots, such as the Robird [Folkertsma et al., 2017], has also found a niche market in the civilian sector to be used as a deterrent for real birds at airports, harbors, and waste management facilities. Successful companies that utilized such unique feature of \ufb02apping-wing robots include The Drone Bird Company (formerly Clear Flight Solutions) and AERIUM Analytics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finnegan, P. (2019). World civil unmanned aerial systems market prole & forecast 2019. Technical report, Teal Group Corporation, Fairfax, VA, USA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Folkertsma, G. A., Straatman, W., Nijenhuis, N., Venner, C. H., and Stramigioli, S. (2017). Robird: a robotic bird of prey. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, 24(3):22{29.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goodheart, B. J. (2011). Tracing the history of the ornithopter: Past, present, and future. Journal of Aviation\/Aerospace Education & Research, 21(1):31-44.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jafferis, N. T., Helbling, E. F., Karpelson, M., and Wood, R. J. (2019). Untethered flight of an insect-sized flapping-wing microscale aerial vehicle. Nature, 570(7762):491-495.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keennon, M., Klingebiel, K., and Won, H. (2012). Development of the nano hummingbird: A tailless flapping wing micro air vehicle. In 50th AIAA aerospace sciences meeting including the new horizons forum and aerospace exposition, page 588.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mazur, M. and Wi\u0013sniewski, A. (2016). Clarity from above-pwc global report on the commercial applications of drone technology. Technical report, PwC Polska, Warszawa, Poland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Munson, K. G. (1969). Aircraft of World War I. Ian Allan Ltd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Valavanis, K. P. and Vachtsevanos, G. J. (2015). Handbook of unmanned aerial vehicles, volume 1. Springer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article has been published as part of Ch.1 of my PhD thesis UAVs Then What the Wright brothers did on the 17th of December 1903 was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":379,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"ub_ctt_via":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/Wright_First_Flight_1903Dec17.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Ramy","author_link":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/author\/ramy-abdelmonemgmail-com\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":435,"href":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions\/435"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramyrashad.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}