Infrastructure

In this paper we introduce the Center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles (C3UV) testbed for collaborative information acquisition. The C3UV testbed has been used for demonstrating a wide range of information-oriented applications executed by collaborative teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This paper presents the C3UV testbed from an architectural stand-point. The testbed includes a estimation and control architecture and a software architecture. The estimation and control architecture is a set of components that can be composed to perform specific missions. The software...

This article reviews the literature on urban air mobility (UAM), examining both the research challenges it presents and the transformative opportunities that make these challenges worth addressing. While UAM has historical precedents, the current iteration is born of novel aircraft technology, primarily electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) and electric short takeoff and landing (eSTOL) aircraft. These advances raise new questions in aerodynamics, control, and integration with urban infrastructure. We explore several key research areas, including aircraft design, vertiport...

This research demonstrated two potential VII (vehicle-infrastructure integration) services, one in traffic data probes and the other with safety. A real private vehicle, operating on California roadways, “talked” to the roadside, with the roadside backhaul interfacing into an existing California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) database and archival application. Demonstration of a probe application showed great promise for supplementing Caltrans’ database with VII- or DSRC-based probe data. Similar promise was shown with a road condition monitoring system, which demonstrated the...

While transportation funding can be collected in a variety of direct (e.g., fares, tolls, and gas taxes) or indirect (e.g., property and sales tax) ways, dynamic demand responsive pricing not only collects revenue but also incentivizes travelers to avoid peak-demand periods, thus utilizing infrastructure capacity more efficiently. Unfortunately, the demand response to price changes, called the price elasticity of demand, is generally greater for longer-term travel planning (e.g., air and rail travel) than it is for more atomized short-term planning (e.g., highway tolls and transit fares)....