Simulating unmanned aerial vehicle flight control and collision detection.

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a small, fast aircraft with many useful features. It is widely used in military reconnaissance, aerial photography, searches, and other fields; it also has very good practical-application and development prospects. Since the UAV's flight orientation is easily changeable, its orientation and flight path are difficult to control, leading to its high damage rate. Therefore, UAV flight-control technology has become the focus of attention. This study focuses on simulating a UAV's flight and orientation control, and detecting collisions between a UAV and objects in a complex virtual environment. The proportional-integral-derivative control algorithm is used to control the orientation and position of the UAV in a virtual environment. A version of the bounding-box method that combines a grid with a k-dimensional tree is adopted in this paper, to improve the system performance and accelerate the collision-detection process. This provides a practical method for future studies on UAV flight position and orientation control, collision detection, etc.

Highly precise stabilization of intracavity prism-based Er:fiber frequency comb using optical-microwave phase detector.

In this Letter, we demonstrate a fully stabilized Er:fiber frequency comb by using a fiber-based, high-precision optical-microwave phase detector. To achieve high-precision and long-term phase locking of the repetition rate to a microwave reference, frequency control techniques (tuning pump power and cavity length) are combined together as its feedback. Since the pump power has been used for stabilization of the repetition rate, we introduce a pair of intracavity prisms as a regulator for carrier-envelope offset frequency, thereby phase locking one mode of the comb to the rubidium saturated absorption transition line. The stabilized comb performs the same high stability as the reference for the repetition rate and provides a residual frequency instability of 3.6×10(-13) for each comb mode. The demonstrated stabilization scheme could provide a high-precision comb for optical communication, direct frequency comb spectroscopy.