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With advances in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies, they have been put to use in a wide variety of scenarios, including emergency surveillance and disaster management. However, their widespread usage is still limited due to their expensive nature. Only user-piloted UAVs are extensively used still today; but their low-budget design leads to lack of auto-guidance and cooperative functions in both line-of-sight and obstacle-sensitive operations. This paper presents a new approach of self-guidance in these budget UAVs for stable maneuverability even in the obstacle-sensitive surroundings. Further, the paper additionally incorporates cooperative functioning in such self-guided budget UAVs for completing collaborative tasks of emergency surveillance. Comparative testbed results show the cost-effective benefits of the proposed methods and the precise working abilities in no-obstacle as well as obstacle-sensitive sites.

In the past decade, search robots in rescue operations have been focused on and developed for the purpose of finding survivors trapped in the rubble of collapsed buildings. Most, of them adopt serpentine mechanisms. However, they might gather to catch debris between tracks or become stuck due to the mechanisms. To get over the problems, a new mobile mechanism have been proposed: flexible mono-tread mobile track (FMT), and a prototype "Rescue mobile track No.2 (RT-02) WORMY" was developed. The machine is composed of a "flexible chain" and vertebral structure, the body flexes in 3D. As a result of the specific turning mechanism, steering performance of FMT is different from the usual differential-type tracked vehicle (DTV). The purpose of this paper is to show the maneuverability of FMT comparing with that of DTV through some experiments.

This paper presents the design and analysis of a thrust vector mechanism applied in a flying wing. A thrust vector mechanism driven by two servos is developed. An analysis of the dynamic differences in minimum hovering radius between conventional flying wing and one with thrust vector mechanism is given and validated with simulation. It is shown that thrust vector has obvious advantages over the usual flying wing including decreasing the hovering radius and decreasing roll angle. The benefits should improve maneuverability and agility.