Unmanned Air Vehicles
José Ignacio Hernández Monroy
Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, México
ignacio.hernandez.monroy@gmail.com
Abstract – In the last few years, use and
research of unmanned air vehicles has
increased importantly. With all the benefits
that unmanned air vehicles offer, such as size,
energy consumption, and the fact that there is
no people onboard, they can and are being used
in various applications to make work easier
and safer for people. This opens a whole new
perspective in how some industries can get
things done, and in the way people live. This
research work presents an overview of
unmanned air vehicle classifications,
applications and some architectures that can be
used to control these systems.
Index Terms – UAV, robotics, control
architecture, control system, automation.
I. INTRODUCTION
In the past, air travel could only be done by some
birds and insects, since by nature this is their main
way of moving. Over time, humans, based on their
observation of nature created legends of men
mounting flying devices or men strapping birdlike
wings, like the Greek legend of Daedalus and
Icarus. Eventually, inspired by these legends and
nature, some men attempted to fly with the help of
devices, typically birdlike wings, and tried by
jumping of a high place. Since those early
approaches to flying, going through man-carrying
kites, hot air balloons, parachutes and dirigibles,
humans managed to fly thanks the advance of
science and technology ending up in planes,
helicopters and more recently in flying vehicles
that are not designed to transport people, in what
we know today as unmanned air vehicles (UAV)
or drones.
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II. UAV APPLICATIONS
Unmanned air vehicles, more commonly known
as UAVs, are a type of aircraft that carries no pilot
on board. UAVs can be a remote-controlled
aircraft, flown by a pilot on ground, in this case
the UAV is also called RPV or Remotely Piloted
Vehicle. Also some UAVs can fly autonomously
based on programmed flight plans or more
complex automation systems.
UAVs were originated in defense for
reconnaissance and combat purpose. Since 1916,
for World War I, the first UAV-considered device
was developed under the name of aerial torpedo
which was a semiautomatic aero plane. Later on
with the advent and integration of advanced
navigation sensors UAVs became an integral part
of armed forces. However, the emergence of
technology not only removed the limitations of
UAV practices in the military field but expanded
its reach into commercial applications related to
agriculture, science, recreation, servile, delivering
goods, photogrammetry and many more [1].
Unlike satellites, helicopters or airplanes, UAVs
provide supremacy over conventional remote
sensing technologies and their benefits lie in terms
of less power consumption, less risk to human
life, ease to data collection, hovering, and ultra-
high spatial resolution forges them an excellent
choice for surveying and mapping [2]. Figure 1
shows the potential applications of UAVs in civil,
environment and military sectors.
 Photography Air quality
Air combat
monitoring

Construction
Environmen Figure 2: GC-L4 Oil Powered Fixed-wing UAV
Civil Soil monitoring
Military
Medical supply
Mining t
Delivery Crop monitoring Border surveillance Flapping wing drones are primarily inspired by
insects such as small hummingbirds to large
Agriculture
Terrain inspection Bomb dropping
dragonflies. The lightweight and flexible wings
Disaster are inspired from the feathers of insects and birds
management
which demonstrate the utility of weight and
Mapping Missile launching
Surveillance
flexibility in aerodynamics. However, these
flapping wings are complex because of their
Figure 1: Potential UAV applications complicated aerodynamics. Flapping drones can
support stable flights in a windy condition, unlike
III. UAV CLASSIFICATION fixed-wing UAVs. Light, flexible and flapper
wings provide the flapper motion with an
Unmanned air vehicles exist in many shapes, sizes actuation mechanism [4].
and operate differently depending on the job for
which they are intended, so they can be classified
upon three main criteria, which are:
aerodynamics, the way they takeoff and land and
their weight and operating range.

A. Based on aerodynamics
Not all UAVs fly the same way, there have been
various developments about the way a UAV can
achieve flight, some of them include the fixed-
wing aircraft, chopper, multi-copter, motor
parachute and glider [2]. All of these have
different specifications and have their positives
and negatives depending the mission they have to
fulfill.
Fixed-wing UAVs are very simple in design and
manufacturing since they are based in the same
physical principles, success and research made for
larger fixed-wing aircrafts such as airplanes. Fixed
wings are the main lift generating elements in
response to forward accelerating speed [2]. Fixed-
wing UAVs have the highest flying speed, have
longer range and endurance and can fly at a higher
altitude than flapping and rotary wing UAVs
which usually perform indoor missions with
slower flight speed [3].
Figure 3: LEFLY F6 3CH Flapping UAV
At the present time multicopters are the most
commercial UAV and it is the UAV type most of
people are familiarized with. They are propelled
by rotary motors and they are divided into specific
categories based on the number and position of
the motors, each category belongs to a specific
type of mission, and based on the mission
requirement they are classified in various
configurations such as monocopter, tricopter
quadcopter, hexacopter and octacopter [2]. Both
multicopters and flapping wing UAVs have the
ability to hover above objects which gives them
much more controllability compared to a fixed-
wing UAV, however, the power a fixed-wing

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UAV can achieve is much more than a flapping introduced. Therefore, nowadays, there are
wing UAV or multicopters. different types of hybrid drones including tilt-
rotor, tilt-wing, tilt-body, and ducted fan UAV.
For these types of UAVs, at first, rotors are
vertical in vertical flight, but for cruise flight they
tilt forward through 90 degrees (Figure 6). In tilt-
wing UAVs, the engines are usually fixed to
wings, and tilt with wing. In this type of drone, the
angle of the whole wing is changed from zero to
90 degrees in order to convert its flight modes
from horizontal to vertical (Figure 7). Both of
these configurations fly successfully as drones,
Figure 4: DJI Spark Quadcopter Drone but the tilt-rotor UAV is most efficient in hover
flight and the tilt-wing UAV is most efficient in
B. Based on landing cruise flight [5].
UAVs can be considered as HTOL (horizontal
take-off landing), VTOL (vertical take-off
landing), hybrid model (tilt-wing, tilt-rotor, tilt-
body, and ducted type), helicopter heli-wing, and
unconventional types.
After many years of development in HTOL
UAVs, there are four configurations, which are
specified by lift/mass balance and by stability and
control. They are tailplane-aft, tailplane forward,
tail-aft on booms, and tailless or flying wing
UAVs. These configurations have the propulsion Figure 6: KARI TR-60 Tilt-rotor UAV
systems at the rear of the fuselage or at the front
side of the UAV [5], as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 7: Iranian Koker 1 Tilt-wing UAV

Figure 5: RQ-4 Global Hawk UAV
C. Based on weight and range
For hovering flight mode, the VTOL UAVs are Some researchers and organizations have
more efficient then HTOL ones. They have classified UAVs based on weight and their
limitations in cruise speed because of the stalling maximum range. Table 1 present the list of the
of the retreating blades, but usually for longer UAV types based on these two characteristics [2].
range missions, UAVs with higher cruise speed
are required. Due to these limitations, the idea to
have a type of drone which combines the
capability of both VTOL and HTOL types was

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 Type Max. Max. Category  It can present mistakes or it can completely
Weight Range fail if the world model is incomplete or inexact
Nano 200 g 5 Km Fixed-wing, [6].
multicopter
Micro 2 Kg 25 Km Fixed-wing, B. Reactive based control architecture
multicopter This architecture is a bottom-up approach that was
Mini 20 Kg 40 Km Fixed-wing, developed to solve some of the deliberative
multicopter architecture weaknesses. It consists on reactive
Light 50 Kg 70 Km Fixed-wing, sets of rules that deal with environmental changes.
multicopter It implements a control strategy as a collection of
Small 150 Kg 150 Km Fixed-wing
condition-action pairs that couples a sensor data to
Tactical 600 Kg 150 Km Fixed-wing
MALE 1000 Kg200 Km Fixed-wing robot action. It can perform tasks in a dynamic
HALE 1000 Kg250 Km Fixed-wing environment without building a world model, it
Heavy 2000 Kg1000 Fixed-wing simply works with control commands based on
Km sensor data. However, this architecture cannot
Super 2500 Kg 1500 Fixed-wing handle high-level goals and complex robot
Heavy Km constraints. It only solves problems in which the
Table 1: UAV classification based on weight and goals are well defined and the robot is equipped
range with enough sensors to perceive the necessary
information [6].
IV. UAV CONTROL ARCHITECTURES
C. Hybrid control architecture
Various control architectures have been designed This architecture was designed to handle high-
in order to develop high performance UAV level goals in a dynamic environment by
systems. Each one of them offers new concepts in combining the best of the deliberative and the
attempt to build an autonomous robot. In this reactive architecture. It employs three hierarchical
section I will explain some of them. levels:
 High level: this level performs complex
A. Deliberative based control architecture computations to generate a task plan that
The deliberative control architecture is a top-down corresponds to a set of actions, this is the
approach, basically it consists of three generic deliberative layer.
sequential functionalities: sensing, planning and  Middle level: it supervises the interaction
acting. The sensing module senses the robot’s between the high and the low level.
surroundings to update a world model. Then, the  Low level: it senses the environment for low
planning module generates a valid task plan control commands. It is in charge of the
considering the robot’s constraints, and finally the robot’s immediate safety such as avoiding
acting module transforms the task plan into low- obstacles. To generate the robot’s motion, this
level commands for the robot to execute them. level executes the actions provided by the high
The robot then repeats these sequential functions level [6].
until it accomplishes its mission. This
architecture, in some cases, is fragile because of D. Behavior control architecture
these reasons: The behavior-based control architecture is
 Since it works with sequential modules, if one inspired in biological studies, it is designed to
module fails, the whole architecture will fail. perform a reactive mapping between perception
 It cannot adapt to a dynamic or unknown and action modules. This architecture divides the
environment. control strategy into a set of behaviors, where
 It requires high computational capabilities: each one is responsible for a specific task.
memory and processing time to build the
world model.

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With this architecture each behavior can act with
deliberative and reactive capabilities, giving the
robot the resources to manage and solve
unpredictable situations without knowing the
environment. Moreover, it offers parallel and
concurrent behaviors that act independently to
achieve the robot’s goal. However, it presents
some drawbacks which are:
 In order to control a robot, this approach must
combine several behaviors, but in some cases
the behavior execution priority becomes really
important.
 Since the behaviors represent low-level
control, they cannot manage high-level goals.
 Since it does not present a planning module, it
may not be able to solve complicated tasks [6].
E. Hybrid behavior control architecture
The purpose of this architecture is to solve some
of the limitations of both the hybrid and behavior-
based architectures. It includes three levels
(layers):
 High level or cognitive layer which reasons
about the mission goals and constraints. It
makes task-oriented reasoning and planning,
and it decides how to coordinate the current
behaviors.
 Middle level or behavior layer which defines
all of the robots behaviors. Each one performs
an specific task.
 Low level which was designed to achieve the
best performance of each behavior and to
execute low-level commands.
Although this architecture joins two very
complete architectures, it has also some miscues
which would be:
 The architecture cannot be reused in different
robot types.
 Interdependency between layers exist, which
could in some cases cause failure of the
architecture [6].
F. Subsumption architecture
This architecture was designed to offer an
approach to building a robust robot system. It
provides a solution for control problems with
multiple sensors and goals. It divides the control
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problem into a set of ordered layers according to
the task achieving behaviors, in which every layer
defines a single competence level that performs a
specific task such as avoiding an obstacle, to
move around an area or to explore the robot’s
environment. It gathers all those layers in order to
build the robot system.
Brooks [7] defines seven competence levels each
of which provides a specific autonomy level:
 The first level makes sure that the control
system avoid contact with other objects.
 The second level offers the ability to wander
around aimlessly without hitting things.
 The third level provides the robot the ability to
explore its environment.
 The fourth level builds an appropriate map of
the environment and plans the appropriate
trajectories to follow.
 The sixth level executes plans to reach the
desired destination.
 Finally, the seventh level reasons about the
behavior and re-plans tasks.
The main idea of the competence levels is to
provide an easy way to move to the next higher
autonomy level. This is achieved by adding a new
competence level over the higher existing control
layer of the architecture.
This architecture has three major weaknesses:
 During its execution, the priority-based
mechanism limits the ways the system can
adapt.
 Since higher levels interfere with lower levels,
they cannot be independent.
 In some situations, crucial behaviors cannot
always be prioritized.
V. CONCLUSIONS
Over the last few years, UAVs have gained
importance in our way of living and much more
inside the industry and of course in the military
field. They have created a new market and also
they have been adopted in many civil tasks like
agriculture, logistics and security because of the
benefits they offer.
Today many civilian UAVs are not yet fully on robotics and automation, vol. 2, no. 1,
automated and are still dependent to human pp. 14–23, 1986.
controllers, but future technology focused on
increasing UAV endurance, power, and
interaction with humans will cause UAVs to gain
even more importance in our daily routine. Along
this, improvement in microprocessor’s computing
capacity and speed will make it easier to
implement artificial intelligence algorithms on
UAVs in order to let the machine solve more
complex problems and take decisions
independently, this will open new opportunities in
all sectors for developing a truly automated UAV
world.

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