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Recent advances in small unmanned air vehicles (UAV) lead to robust on-board stabilized platforms ready to use for real-world problems. As a result, many different autonomy functions have been demonstrated, which allow controlling the UAVs at high level. However, the great variety of platforms also poses new challenges when adapting these autonomy functions to new platforms. For instance modifying a trajectory planning algorithm, which was designed for a rotary-aircraft with a moving camera, to work on a fixed-wing aircraft with a static camera is not a trivial task. Often such algorithmic solutions are tailored so specifically to a certain platform that it becomes very complicated to reuse algorithms. This results in a variety of many different approaches trying to solve the same task. We therefore encourage designing algorithms for UAVs autonomy function to be more generic. As an example, we focus on the task to autonomously follow a moving ground object using an UAV.

Trajectory optimization methods have been successfully used to minimize pollutant emissions during departure and arrivals, and noise over communities near the airports. This has led to the development, within the CleanSky European research project, of a trajectory optimization framework capable of finding optimal flight paths that minimize emissions, flight cost and noise impact on the population, while still taking into account aircraft limitations and operational restrictions. While this can be very useful when the next generation of trajectory-based air-traffic management systems arrives, as being proposed by SESAR and NextGen, it can still provide benefits in the current context, if implemented taking into account the air navigation rules.

The increasing pressure to cut aircraft emissions in the last decades have resulted in more efficient aircrafts, employing new generation engines and highly advanced wing designs. Nevertheless, as aircraft fleet grows, efficiency gains from both technological and operational improvements will most probably be surpassed. Therefore, even more ambitious improvements shall be necessary to reduce overall aviation impact. In addition, not only pollutant emissions have to be reduced, but also the noise impact on communities in airports’ neighborhood. This might conflict with the goal of lower fuel consumption, and has to be studied case by case. Current in-use departure and approach procedures are far from optimal - even when developed with the aim of being either noise or fuel-efficient. In this work, we present the ongoing research on an online trajectory modeling tool based on optimal control techniques, capable of obtaining and redesigning flight procedures automatically.