The 2013 International conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, ICUAS’13, will be held in Atlanta, GA, the city called the Queen of the South, on May 28-31. May 28 will be a Workshop/Tutorial day, followed by a three day technical Conference. ICUAS’13 will host representatives from academia, industry, federal/state agencies, government, the private sector, users, practitioners and engineers who wish to be affiliated with and contribute technically to this highly demanding and rapidly evolving and expanding field. ICUAS’13 will be sponsored by the ICUAS Association, a non-profit organization; details about the organization may be found here.
UAS related research and development has reached the level of maturity that allows national and international organizations, agencies, industry, military and civilian authorities to speak openly about their upcoming integration into the national airspace, the need for well defined roadmaps of UAS expectations, the need for technical requirements and standards that are prerequisite to their full utilization, as well as legal, policy and ethical issues. Although military applications of UAS have dominated the field thus far, a significant percentage of future applications will focus on the civilian and public domains.
Already UAS are being used for environment protection and climate monitoring. Challenges to be faced and overcome include, among others, see-and-avoid systems, robust, fault-tolerant flight control systems, payloads, communications, levels of autonomy, manned-unmanned swarms, networked-controlled swarms, as well as challenges related to policies, procedures, regulations, safety, risk analysis assessment, airworthiness, certification issues, operational constraints, standardization and frequency management, all of paramount importance, which, coupled with ‘smart’, ‘environmentally friendly’ cutting edge technologies will pave the way towards full integration of UAS with manned aviation and into the respective national airspace.
ICUAS’13 aims at bringing together different groups of qualified military and civilian representatives worldwide, organization representatives, funding agencies, industry and academia, to discuss the current state of UAS advances, and the roadmap to their full utilization in military and integration in civilian domains. Focused interests of diverse groups involved in UAS research and development will be discussed. Special emphasis will be given to current and future research opportunities, and to “what comes next” in terms of the essential technologies that need to be utilized to advance further UAS.
Through Keynote/Plenary addresses, invited and solicited presentations, and round table discussions, it is expected that the outcome of the Conference will be a better understanding of what industry, the military and civilian national and international authorities need, and what are the crucial next steps that need to be completed before UAS are widely accepted even in everyday life applications.