Safe autonomous landing for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in populated areas is a crucial aspect for successful integration of UAVs in populated environments. Nonetheless, validating autonomous landing in real scenarios is a challenging task with a high risk of injuring people. In this work, we propose a framework for safe real-time and thorough evaluation of vision-based autonomous landing in populated scenarios, using photo-realistic virtual environments and physics-based simulation. The proposed evaluation pipeline includes the use of Unreal graphics engine coupled with AirSim for realistic drone simulation to evaluate landing strategies. Then, Software-/Hardware-In-The-Loop can be used to test beforehand the performance of the algorithms. The final validation stage consists in a Robot-In-The-Loop evaluation strategy where a real drone must perform autonomous landing maneuvers in real-time, with an avatar drone in a virtual environment mimicking its behavior, while the detection algorithms run in the virtual environment (virtual reality to the robot). This method determines the safe landing areas based on computer vision and convolutional neural networks to avoid colliding with people in static and dynamic scenarios. To test the robustness of the algorithms in adversary conditions, different urban-like environments were implemented, including moving agents and different weather conditions. We also propose different metrics to quantify the performance of the landing strategies, establishing a baseline for comparison with future works on this challenging task, and analyze them through several randomized iterations. The proposed approach allowed us to safely validate the autonomous landing strategies, providing an evaluation pipeline, and a benchmark for comparison. An extensive evaluation showed a 99% success rate in static scenarios and 87% in dynamic cases, demonstrating that the use of autonomous landing algorithms considerably prevents accidents involving humans, facilitating the integration of drones in human-populated spaces, which may help to unleash the full potential of drones in urban environments. Besides, this type of development helps to increase the safety of drone operations, which would advance drone flight regulations and allow their use in closer proximity to humans.

Several variations of stochastic processes have been studied in the literature to obtain reliability estimations of products and systems from degradation data. As the degradation trajectories may have different degradation rates, it is necessary to consider alternatives to characterize their individual behavior. Some stochastic processes have a constant drift parameter, which defines the mean rate of the degradation process. However, for some cases, the mean rate must not be considered as constant, which means that the rate varies in the different stages of the degradation process. This poses an opportunity to study alternative strategies that allow to model this variation in the drift. For this, we consider the Hjorth rate, which is a failure rate that can define different shapes depending on the values of its parameters. In this paper, the integration of this hazard rate with the Wiener process is studied to individually identify the degradation rate of multiple degradation trajectories. Random effects are considered in the model to estimate a parameter of the Hjorth rate for every degradation trajectory, which allows us to identify the type of rate. The reliability functions of the proposed model is obtained through numerical integration as the function results in a complex form. The proposed model is illustrated in two case studies based on a crack propagation and infrared LED datasets. It is found that the proposed approach has better performance for the reliability estimation of products based on information criteria.

This article presents the design and implementation of a speed control system for a direct-current (DC) motor that improves the performance of an earlier design previously studied in the literature by incorporating an integral component that enhances control accuracy and robustness, as well as by including a smoother hyperbolic function in the control law to obtain a continuous, smooth, and bounded control signal. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the integration of the integral action within a bounded hyperbolic control framework, which simultaneously ensures actuator constraint satisfaction, reduces chattering effects, and improves steady-state accuracy, making it particularly suitable for real-time implementation. A detailed description of the dynamic model of the motor is provided in both frequency-domain and state-space representations to support the control synthesis development. The control strategy was initially developed and validated using Matlab/Simulink simulations and subsequently implemented on an experimental platform, allowing a direct comparison between simulation results and experimental data for both the original and proposed controllers. A series of tests was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed controller in various operating scenarios, including constant speed regulation, disturbance rejection, stepwise speed changes, and predefined trajectory tracking. The results demonstrate that the proposed controller achieves smooth bounded control signals, improved transient response, and enhanced robustness under diverse operating conditions, confirming its effectiveness for practical DC motor speed control applications.