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Added masses computation is a crucial aspect to be considered when the density of a body moving in a fluid is comparable to the density of the fluid displaced: added mass can be defined as the inertia added to a system because an accelerating or decelerating body displaces some volume of neighboring fluid as it moves through it. The motion of vehicles like airships and ships can be addressed only by keeping into account the effect of added masses, while in case of aircrafts and helicopters this contribution is usually neglected. Lighter Than Air flight simulation, unmanned airships flight control system, airships flight dynamics are typical applications in which added masses are fundamental to achieve an effective and realistic modeling. A panel based method using the mesh of an airship external shape is developed to account for the added massed.

The flight simulation of airships and hot air balloons usually considers the envelope geometry as a fixed shape, whose volume is eventually reduced by ballonets. However, the dynamic pressure or helium leaks in airships, and the release of air to allow descent in hot air balloons can significantly change the shape of the envelope leading to potential dangerous situations. In fact, in case of semi-rigid and non-rigid airships a reduction in envelope internal pressure can reduce the envelope bending stiffness leading to the loss of the typical axial-symmetric shape. For hot air balloons thing goes even worse since the lost of internal pressure can lead to the collapsing of the balloon shape to a sort of vertically stretched geometry (similar to a torch) which is not able to sustain the attached basket and its payload.

This paper describes the design and development of a virtual environment conceived to support flight operations of an Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) used for wind mapping in the proximity of existing or planned wind farms. The virtual environment can be used in pre-flight briefings aiming to define a trajectory from a list of waypoints, to change and eventually re-plan the mission in case of intersection with no fly zones, to simulate the mission, and to preview images/videos taken from the UAV on-board cameras. During flight, the tool can be used to compute the wind speed along the trajectory by analyzing the data streaming from the UAV. The integration of Augmented Reality (AR) techniques in the flight environment provides assistance in remotely piloted landings, and allows visualizing flight and environmental information that are critical to the mission.

The high number of hull losses is a main concern in the UAV field, mostly due to the high cost of on-board equipment. A crashworthiness design can be helpful to control the extent and position of crash impact damage, minimizing equipment losses. However, the wide use of composite materials has recently put the accent on the lack of data about the behavior of these structures under operative loads, such as the crash conditions. This paper presents the outcome of a set of tests carried out to achieve a controlled crush of UAV structures, and to maximize the Specific Energy Absorption. In this work, a small-scale experimental test able to characterize the energy absorption of a Carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer under compression was developed introducing self-supporting sinusoidal shape specimens, which avoid the need for complex anti-buckling devices.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide the ability to perform a variety of experimental tests of systems and unproven research technologies, including new autopilot systems and obstacle avoidance capabilities, without risking the lives of human pilots. This paper describes the activities of design, optimization, and flight operations of a UAV conceived at Clarkson University (USA) and equipped to perform wind speed measurements to support wind farmsite planning. The UAV design has been assisted and validated by the use of an automatic virtual environment for the assisted design of civil UAVs. This tool can be used as a “computing machine” for civil UAVs. The operator inputs the mission profile and other generic parameters and data about performance, aerodynamics, and weight breakdown are extracted. A mathematical model of the UAV for flight simulation and its dynamic computations, along with automatic drawing is also produced.

Due to the recent anti-pollution policies, the performance increase in Spark Ignition (SI) engines is currently under the focus of automotive manufacturers. This trend drives control systems designers to investigate accurate solutions and build more sophisticated algorithms to increase the efficiency of this kind of engines. The development of a control strategy is composed of several phases and steps, and the first part of such process is typically spent in defining and investigating the logic of the strategy. During this phase it is often useful to have a light engine simulator, which allows to have robust synthetic combustion data with a low calibration and computational effort. In the first part of this paper, a description of the control-oriented ANalytical Engine SIMulator (ANESIM) is carried out.

The maturity reached in the development of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) systems is making them more and more attractive for a vast number of civil missions. Clearly, the introduction of UAVs in the civil airspace requiring practical and effective regulation is one of the most critical issues being currently discussed. As several civil air authorities report in their regulations “Sense and Avoid” or “Detect and Avoid” capabilities are critical to the successful integration of UAV into the civil airspace. One possible approach to achieve this capability, specifically for operations beyond the Line-of-Sight, would be to equip air vehicles with a vision-based system using cameras to monitor the surrounding air space and to classify other air vehicles flying in close proximity. This paper presents an image-based application for the supervised classification of air vehicles.

This paper presents a 14 degrees of freedom vehicle model. Despite numerous software are nowadays commercially available, the model presented in this paper has been built starting from a blank sheet because the goal of the authors was to realize a model suitable for real-time simulation, compatible with the computational power of typical electronic control units, for on-board applications. In order to achieve this objective a complete vehicle dynamics simulation model has been developed in Matlab/Simulink environment: having a complete knowledge of the model's structure, it is possible to adapt its complexity to the computational power of the hardware used to run the simulation, a crucial feature to achieve real-time execution in actual ECUs.