Unmanned marine vehicles (UMVs) is a collective term commonly used to describe autonomous underwater vehicles, remotely operated vehicles, semi-submersibles, and unmanned surface craft. UMVs are heavily used in the military, civilian, and scientific communities for undertaking designated missions whilst either operating autonomously and/or in co-operation with other types of vehicles. Advanced marine vehicles are increasing their capabilities and the degree of autonomy more and more in order to perform more sophisticated maritime missions. Remotely operated vehicles are no longer cost-effective since they are limited by economic support costs, and the presence and skills of the human operator. Alternatively, autonomous surface and underwater vehicles have the potential to operate with greatly reduced overhead costs and level of operator intervention.An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot aboard. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS); these include a UAV, a ground-based controller, and a system of communications between the two. Compared to manned aircraft, UAVs were originally used for missions too "dull, dirty or dangerous" for humans. While they originated mostly in military applications, their use is rapidly expanding to commercial, scientific, recreational, agricultural, and other applications such as policing, peacekeeping and surveillance, product deliveries, aerial photography, agriculture, smuggling, and drone racing. Civilian UAVs now vastly outnumber military UAVs, with estimates of over a million sold by 2015, so they can be seen as an early commercial application of Autonomous Things, to be followed by the autonomous car and home robots.Nowadays, UMVs and UAVs are playing an increasingly important role in both controlling community and engineering applications. For example, UMVs and UAVs provide more efficient ways to execute various challenging tasks. However, these systems are usually featured with dynamics coupling, actuator saturation, underactuated structure, time-varying disturbance, etc., thereby resulting in great challenges and difficulties in system analysis and controller design. Recently, by employing intelligent approaches, advanced control methodologies for unmanned systems have been rapidly developed. Note that the dynamic environment is usually changing and the unmanned systems must adapt themselves accordingly. In this context, on one hand, more efforts should be focused on the methodology of the learning system. For example, fast adaptation and self-organizing capability are essentially required. On the other hand, advanced analysis tools should be deployed to enhance the control performance. Towards this end, human-like intelligence should be integrated tightly with nonlinear design for complex control tasks of autonomous systems.The main objective of this edited book is to address various challenges and issues pertinent to the intelligent control of UMVs and UAVs. (Nova)

This book contains 35 chapters written by experts in developing techniques for making aerial vehicles more intelligent, more reliable, more flexible in use, and safer in operation.It will also serve as an inspiration for further improvement of the design and application of aeral vehicles. The advanced techniques and research described here may also be applicable to other high-tech areas such as robotics, avionics, vetronics, and space.

The biennial Congress of the Italian Society of Oral Pathology and Medicine (SIPMO) is an International meeting dedicated to the growing diagnostic challenges in the oral pathology and medicine field. The III International and XV National edition will be a chance to discuss clinical conditions which are unusual, rare, or difficult to define. Many consolidated national and international research groups will be involved in the debate and discussion through special guest lecturers, academic dissertations, single clinical case presentations, posters, and degree thesis discussions. The SIPMO Congress took place from the 17th to the 19th of October 2019 in Bari (Italy), and the enclosed copy of Proceedings is a non-exhaustive collection of abstracts from the SIPMO 2019 contributions.

"A CRC title, part of the Taylor & Francis imprint, a member of the Taylor & Francis Group, the academic division of T&F Informa plc."

This book presents an Intelligent Control Architecture (ICA) to enable multiple collaborating marine vehicles to autonomously carry out underwater intervention missions. The presented ICA is generic in nature but aimed at a case study where a marine surface craft and an underwater vehicle are required to work cooperatively. It is shown that they are capable of cooperating autonomously towards the execution of complex activities since they have different but complementary capabilities. The ICA implementation is verified in simulation, and validated in trials by means of a team of autonomous marine robots. This book also presents architectural details and evaluation scenarios of the ICA, results of simulations and trials from different maritime operations, and future research directions.

First used in military applications, unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming an integral aspect of modern society and are expanding into the commercial, scientific, recreational, agricultural, and surveillance sectors. With the increasing use of these drones by government officials, business professionals, and civilians, more research is needed to understand their complexity both in design and function. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice is a critical source of academic knowledge on the design, construction, and maintenance of drones, as well as their applications across all aspects of society. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as intelligent systems, artificial intelligence, and situation awareness, this publication is an ideal reference source for military consultants, military personnel, business professionals, operation managers, surveillance companies, agriculturalists, policymakers, government officials, law enforcement, IT professionals, academicians, researchers, and graduate-level students.