UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES (UAVs) AND DRONE TECHNOLOGY: Design, Aerodynamics, Propulsion, Flight Control, Navigation, Communication, and Applications (Modern Aerospace Engineering Series) (en Inglés)
Reseña del libro "UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES (UAVs) AND DRONE TECHNOLOGY: Design, Aerodynamics, Propulsion, Flight Control, Navigation, Communication, and Applications (Modern Aerospace Engineering Series) (en Inglés)"
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have moved, within the span of a single professional career, from a specialized military niche to one of the most rapidly diversifying branches of aerospace engineering. A student entering this field today must understand not only classical flight mechanics but also brushless motor control, GNSS-denied navigation, machine-learning-based perception, spectrum-constrained radio communication, and a regulatory landscape that continues to be rewritten year by year. This breadth is precisely what makes UAV technology exciting to teach and difficult to write about comprehensively — and it is the gap this book attempts to close. This textbook is written for senior undergraduate and graduate students in aerospace, mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering, as well as for practicing engineers, researchers, and technically-minded regulators and policy analysts who need a rigorous but accessible single-volume reference spanning the full UAV technology stack — from airframe aerodynamics through propulsion, flight control, navigation, communication, and real-world applications. Each part of the book can, to a reasonable extent, be read independently by readers with the appropriate prerequisite background (undergraduate-level dynamics, control theory, and signals and systems are assumed throughout), while the book as a whole is sequenced to build cumulatively, from historical and regulatory foundations in Part I, through physical design in Parts II and III, to control, autonomy, communication, and application in Parts IV through VI. A note on scope and currency: unmanned systems regulation, in particular, changes faster than any printed text can track in real time. Every regulatory figure, date, and threshold cited in this book has been checked against publicly available primary sources — statutes, final rules, and standards documents — current as of the time of writing, and is presented with its governing authority and, where practical, its effective date, so that readers can independently verify currency against the relevant national aviation authority before relying on it operationally. Every diagram, schematic, and system architecture figure in this book has been newly drawn for this text to illustrate general engineering principles; none reproduce proprietary manufacturer drawings, and all are captioned with their conceptual sources. Tables of comparative specifications synthesize publicly available data from manufacturer documentation, peer-reviewed literature, and government sources cited in each chapter's reference list. I am grateful to the broader community of UAV researchers, standards bodies, and open-source autopilot developers whose published work made a text of this breadth possible, and to the students whose questions, over many years of teaching flight mechanics and autonomous systems, shaped which explanations belong in a book like this one.
