Aviation

Stability Analysis of Recirculation Bubble Flow in a Viscoelastic Fluid

Carriera, Beatriz L.
Gennaro, Elmer M.
Daniel Rodriguez
Souza, Leonardo F.
2026

The 10th IUTAM Symposium on Laminar-Turbulent Transition, held in September 2024 at Shinshu University in Nagano, Japan, attracted nearly 135 participants from 18 countries across five continents and featured more than 100 presentations in addition to keynote and plenary lectures by eight internationally renowned invited speakers. Topics included high-speed flows, boundary layer transition, cross-flow instability, free-stream turbulence, roughness, separation, general instabilities, and complex flows. The presentations were a well-balanced mix of theoretical, numerical, and experimental...

Analysis of Baggage Sorting Schemes for Containerized Aircraft

Robusté, Francesc
Carlos Daganzo
1992

Baggage transfer is a critical factor in determining connecting schedules at hub airports. This paper examines the potential benefits of “ramp transfers”-bags that bypass the hub sorting facility because they have been presorted at their point of origin. It presents three idealized baggage presorting strategies for containerized (wide-bodied) aircraft. These strategies are compared under a range of conditions, and are then integrated in a computer tool that can handle more complex problems. Presorting baggage at the origin by final destinations or groups of final destinations may be...

Reversibility of the Time-Dependent Shortest Path Problem

Carlos Daganzo
1998

Time-dependent shortest path problems arise in a variety of applications; e.g., dynamic traffic assignment (DTA), network control, automobile driver guidance, ship routing and airplane dispatching. In the majority of cases one seeks the cheapest (least generalized cost) or quickest route between an origin and a destination for a given time of departure. This is the "forward" shortest path problem. In some applications, however, e.g., when dispatching airplanes from airports and in DTA versions of the "morning commute problem", one seeks the cheapest or quickest routes for a given arrival...

An Architecture for UAV Team Control

Rathinam, Sivakumar
Zennaro, Marco
Mak, Tony
Raja Sengupta
2004

Recent years has seen a widespread interest in the use of Unmanned aircraft vehicles for military applications. These UAV's can be used in many applications such as surveillance, information gathering, suppression of enemy defenses, air to air combat, mapping buildings and facilities etc. In this paper, we present an architecture with the necessary algorithms that we have implemented to control a team of UAVs to search for targets such as SAMs, ground troops, artillery, tanks etc in a given region.

A Resource Allocation Algorithm for Multivehicle Systems With Nonholonomic Constraints

Rathinam, Sivakumar
Raja Sengupta
Darbha, Swaroop
2007

This paper is about the allocation of tours of m targets to n vehicles. The motion of the vehicles satisfies a nonholonomic constraint (i.e., the yaw rate of the vehicle is bounded). Each target is to be visited by one and only one vehicle. Given a set of targets and the yaw rate constraints on the vehicles, the problem addressed in this paper is 1) to assign each vehicle a sequence of targets to visit, and 2) to find a feasible path for each vehicle that passes through the assigned targets with a requirement that the vehicle returns to its initial position. The heading angle at each...

Target detection and position likelihood using an aerial image sensor

Kim, Zuwhan
Raja Sengupta
2008

Sensor-based control is an emerging challenge in UAV applications. It is essential in a sensing task to account for sensor measurement errors when computing a target position estimate. Source of measurement error includes those in vehicle position and orientation measurements as well as algorithm failures such as missed detections or false detections. Incorporating such errors in aerial sensors is non-trival because of the camera’s perspective geometry. This paper is about a method to incorporate such errors into target position estimates and a calibration methodology to measure the error...

An Unmanned Aerial Traffic Management Solution for Cities Using an Air Parcel Model

Foina, Aislan Gomide
Krainer, Clemens
Raja Sengupta
2015

The Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) market once belonged to professional companies only. Now many amateur pilots fly cheap, smartphone controlled models available in any electronic store. Due to altitude, speed, and weight, these flying objects can cause damage and injury. Hence, a way to manage them is necessary. This paper presents a UAS Traffic Management (UTM) system comprising three components: a UAS electronic identification plate with an embedded logger, a ground identification equipment, and a Traffic Routing System (TRS). This UTM system uses the air parcel model, which divides the...

A Power Consumption Model for Multi-Rotor Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Liu, Zhilong
Raja Sengupta
Kurzhanskiy, Alex
2017

We develop a theoretical power consumption model for multi-rotor Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), estimate the model parameters, and validate it by flying an IRIS+ quadrotor UAS and measuring its energy consumption experimentally. The model is derived from the helicopter literature. Such models are required to create UAS flight planning systems.

An Energy-Based Flight Planning System for Unmanned Traffic Management

Liu, Zhilong
Raja Sengupta
2017

In this paper, we proposed an energy-based flight planning system for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM). Fuel consumption estimation at the flight planning stage is safety critical in general aviation, because energy-related failures are often life-threatening. However, conservative fuel estimation is not economical and environmentally friendly because carrying unnecessary fuel load burns a lot of extra fuel. The same reasoning holds in UTM. Aviation researchers are actively working on optimizing fuel loading, but such research is lacking in UTM. In this paper, we...

Cooperative and Non-Cooperative UAS Traffic Volumes

Bulusu, Vishwanath
Raja Sengupta
Polishchuk, Valentin
Sedov, Leonid
2017

We describe an analytical process to determine how much UAS traffic is feasible. The process is a simulator and data processing tools. The two are applied to the US San Francisco Bay Area and Norrkoping, Sweden. The amount of UAS traffic is measured in flights per day and simulated up to 200,000 flights. A UAS traffic volume is feasible if specified metrics meet operational requirements with high probability and are stable, in the sense of being below thresholds observed for monotone properties in random geometric graphs. We focus on conflict cluster size and argue for it as a fundamental...