Proceedings

Assessment of Reproducibility and Linearity of the NMIA Bell Prover Using a High Flowrate Sonic Nozzle Array

Critical flow Venturi, or sonic, nozzles are widely used in gas flow metrology as stable and convenient transfer standards. Once the nozzle coefficient has been determined by calibration against a primary standard, the mass flowrate can be determined by knowledge of the upstream gas composition and its pressure and temperature. As these can be determined with great precision, the mass flow achieved can be more reproducible than the nozzle calibration. At NMIA, sonic nozzles used to cover the range 1 to 25 m³/h are calibrated against a bell prover, with an uncertainty of 0.13 % ( k = 2)....

Bilateral Comparison Confirms NIM’s and NIST’s Gas Flow Capabilities

A bilateral comparison of the gas flow standards of the National Institute of Metrology (NIM) in China and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the USA was conducted from June 2008 to October 2009. Two critical flow venturis (CFVs) with nominal throat diameters of 10 mm and 20 mm, respectively, were selected as transfer standards. The CFVs were calibrated on NIM’s 20 m³ PVTt system and then on NIST’s 26 m³ PVTt system. The results demonstrate the equivalence between NIM’s and NIST’s gas flow measurement capabilities for flows ranging from 1000 liters per minute to...

Flow Measurement and Energy

ELROB 2018 - Team Patria participating in Convoy Scenario

The team Patria consists of three project partners with different focus in research and development. The Patria AMV vehicles used in the scenario are both R&D platforms, which have been developed in a cooperation of Patria and Diehl Defence. The platforms are used by the team in the convoy competition at the ELROB 2018. While one of the vehicles (called AMV 2) is equipped with a Drive-by-Wire system developed by Patria and with a sensor package to track a leading vehicle the other AMV (AMV 1) is a vehicle with standard configuration. Only a LTB (Leader Tracking Box) developed by Diehl...

ELROB 2018 - Team Diehl THeMIS participating in Mule Scenario

The team Diehl THeMIS Vehicle is the tracked THeMIS platform developed and produced by Milrem Robotics (EST). Milrem has participated with the THeMIS in several competitions in the last couples of years like SMET (US) and Last Mile (UK). For the mule scenario the THeMIS will use a local terrain based grid map generated based on two LiDAR systems in combination with a waypoint navigation algorithm that has been developed and optimized continuously in the last five years. Both, map and navigation algorithm has been developed by Diehl Defence and Hentschel System.

Unmanned vehicle systems in unstructured environments: challenge and current status

The scientific and applied interest to Unmanned vehicle systems (UVS) or Unmanned guided vehicles (UGV) is growing every year and a lot of world-known universities and companies are working very hard in R&D of UVS. The fully autonomous vehicles or ones with different degrees of autonomy vehicles are used on the land, in the air, and in the sea for broad range of technologies including hazardous waste cleanup, agriculture crops processing, transportation, underwater monitoring, nuclear power station repair, as well as security, inspection, demining, military operations.The new uses for these...

RPAS -UGV: a growing market for military and civilian applications

The Royal Military Academy was coordinating two European Projects , one focusing on Humanitarian Demining, the other one on Search and Rescue Operations, both projects intending to exploit the improved performances of Robotics Systems, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or, better said, Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) in particular and Unmanned Land-vehicles or UGV. The RPAS are characterized by an increasing development and use in the military sector for combat, combat support and logistic missions, as well as in the civilian sphere, essentially focusing on Environmental Surveillance...

ELROB 2018 – Convoy and Mule of Team MuCAR

We present the hard- and software components of team MuCAR’s fully autonomous vehicles to participate at the ELROB 2018 in the convoy and mule scenarios. For the convoy scenario, different tracking approaches are applied to track the leading vehicle. Data association of the tracking results is done in a PHD filter framework. Given the resulting estimate, an optimization-based planning module computes kinematically feasible trajectories to follow the leading vehicle’s path as close as possible with a velocity-dependent lateral distance. In the mule scenario, the leading guide is tracked...

Qualitative and quantitative validation of drone detection systems

As drones are more and more entering our world, so comes the need to regulate the access to airspace for these systems. A necessary tool in order to do this is a means of detecting these drones. Numerous commercial and non-commercial parties have started the development of such drone detection systems. A big problem with these systems is that the evaluation of the performance of drone detection systems is a difficult operation, which requires the careful consideration of all technical and non-technical aspects of the system under test. Indeed, weather conditions and small variations in the...

In-flight launch of unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper considers the development of a system to enable the in-flight-launch of one aerial system by another. The paper will discuss how an optimal release mechanism was developed, taking into account the aerodynamics of one specific mother and child UAV. Furthermore, it will discuss the PID-based control concept that was introduced in order to autonomously stabilize the child UAV after being released from the mothership UAV. Finally, the paper will show how the concept of a mothership UAV + child UAV combination could be usefully taken into advantage in the context of a search and rescue...