Les A. Piegl – författare

Commercial interest for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) has seen a steady increase over the last decade. Nevertheless, UAS operations have remained almost exclusively military. This is mainly due to the lack of a regulatory framework that allows only limited public and civil UAS operations with usually crippling restrictions. Although efforts from the Federal Aviation Administration and its partners are already underway to integrate UAS in the National Airspace System (NAS), the appropriate regulation will not be ready for several more years. In the meantime UAS developers need to be aware of the current operational restrictions, as well as make informed decisions on their research and development efforts so that their designs will be airworthy when the regulatory framework is in place.

This monograph aims to present an overview of current aviation regulation followed by an investigation of issues and factors that will affect future regulation.

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have seen unprecedented levels of growth during the last decade in both military and civilian domains. It is anticipated that civilian applications will be dominant in the future, although there are still barriers to be overcome and technical challenges to be met. Integrating UAS into, for example, civilian space, navigation, autonomy, see-detect-and-avoid systems, smart designs, system integration, vision-based navigation and training, to name but a few areas, will be of prime importance in the near future.

This special volume is the outcome of research presented at the International Symposium on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, held in Orlando, Florida, USA, from June 23-25, 2008, and presents state-of-the-art findings on topics such as: UAS operations and integration into the national airspace system; UAS navigation and control; micro-, mini-, small UAVs; UAS simulation testbeds and frameworks; UAS research platforms and applications; UAS applications.

This book aims at serving as a guide tool on UAS for engineers and practitioners, academics, government agencies and industry.

Previously published in the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, 54 (1-3, 2009).

This book presents, in a comprehensive way, current unmanned aviation regulation, airworthiness certification, special aircraft categories, pilot certification, federal aviation requirements, operation rules, airspace classes and regulation development models.

It discusses unmanned aircraft systems levels of safety derived mathematically based on the corresponding levels for manned aviation. It provides an overview of the history and current status of UAS airworthiness and operational regulation worldwide. Existing regulations have been developed considering the need for a complete regulatory framework for UAS. It focuses on UAS safety assessment and functional requirements, achieved in terms of defining an “Equivalent Level of Safety”, or ELOS, with that of manned aviation, specifying what the ELOS requirement entails for UAS regulations. To accomplish this, the safety performance of manned aviation is first evaluated, followed by a novel model to derive reliability requirements for achieving target levels of safety (TLS) for ground impact and mid-air collision accidents.It discusses elements of a viable roadmap leading to UAS integration in to the NAS.

For this second edition of the book almost all chapters include major updates and corrections. There is also a new appendix chapter.