Aerial surveillance missions require a geographical region known as the area of interest to be inspected. The route that the aerial reconnaissance vehicle will follow is known as the flight route. Flight route planning operation has to be done before the actual mission is executed. A flight route may consist of hundreds of pre-defined geographical positions called waypoints. The optimal flight route planning manages to find a tour passing through all of the waypoints by covering the minimum possible distance. Due to the combinatorial nature of the problem it is impractical to devise a solution using brute force approaches. This study presents a strategy to find a cost effective and near-optimal solution to the flight route planning problem. The proposed approach is implemented on GPU using CUDA.

This thesis describes work in a variety of topics related to aerial robotics, including system identification, state estimation, control, and path planning. The path planners described in this thesis are used to guide a fixed-wing UAV along paths that optimize the aircraft's ability to track a ground target. Existing path planners in the literature either ignore occlusions entirely, or they have limited capability to handle different types of paths. The planners described in this thesis are novel in that they specifically account for the effect of occlusions in urban environments, and they can produce a much richer set of paths than existing planners that account for occlusions. A 3D camera positioning system from Motion Analysis is also described in the context of state estimation, system identification, and control of small unmanned rotorcraft. Specifically, the camera positioning system is integrated inside a control architecture that allows a quadrotor helicopter to fly autonomously using truth data from the positioning system. This thesis describes the system architecture in addition to experiments in state estimation, control, and system identification. There are subtleties involved in using accelerometers for state estimation onboard flying rotorcraft that are often ignored even by researchers well-acquainted with the UAV field. In this thesis, accelerometer-rotorcraft behavior is described in detail. The consequences of ignoring accelerometer-rotorcraft behavior are evaluated, and an observer is presented that achieves better performance by specifically modeling actual accelerometer behavior. The observer is implemented in hardware and results are presented.

Doctor of Philosophy / Traditional military descriptions of conflict tend to focus on the movement of soldiers and armies across battlefields. When the airplane emerged, it forced military theorists to contend with a new, vertical, dimension of conflict. In America, the United States Air Force assumed an important role in this vertical dimension as the country's delivery mechanism for nuclear weapons. However, at the same time that politicians, academics, and military officials debated the offensive uses for aircraft a second debate occurred describing how best to use military means to defend the North American continent. Those who advocated for a defensive system to protect North American, including the President Eisenhower, strongly advocated for a continent-wide test of the new air defense system. That test was conducted once a year between 1960 and 1962 during which all civilian air travel across the U.S. and Canada was suspended. The tests were called the "Sky Shield" exercises. This research shows how a prevailing mood of fear and vulnerability gave air defense proponents the political capital to build a continental air defense network and test it during the Sky Shield exercises. Further, it describes the enduring legacy of this domestically-focused Cold War defense program. The research finds that America's approach to Cold War continental defense was strong when it was aligned with the White House's nuclear strategy, but when successive political leaders changed nuclear strategies that decision negatively influenced continental defense programs. This research is useful because it examines a relatively under-explored area of Cold War defense programs. Traditionally these studies focus on offensive capabilities far from American shores. This study instead examines homeland defense and how it changed during the Cold War as a function of changing nuclear programs and changing threats to the United States.

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