Drones, Volume 5, Issue 4

The use of drones in mining and geological exploration is under rapid development, especially in the field of magnetic field prospection. In part, this is related to the advantages presented for over ground surveys, allowing for high-density data acq...

The ability to classify drones using radar signals is a problem of great interest. In this paper, we apply convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) spectrograms of the simulated radar signals reflected from the...

The uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV or drone) industry is expanding, offering services such as video/photography, inspection, monitoring, surveying, and logistics. This is leading to competing demands for airspace with existing crewed aircraft activitie...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming integrated into a wide range of modern IoT applications. The growing number of networked IoT devices generates a large amount of data. However, processing and memorizing this massive volume of data at loca...

Since the Fourth Industrial Revolution, existing manpower-centric manufacture has been shifting towards technology and data-centric production in all areas of society. The construction sector is also facing a new paradigm called smart construction wi...

A proper classification of 3D point clouds allows fully exploiting data potentiality in assessing and preserving cultural heritage. Point cloud classification workflow is commonly based on the selection and extraction of respective geometric features...

Explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) robots can replace humans that work in hazardous environments to ensure worker safety. Thus, they have been widely developed and deployed. However, existing EOD robots have some limitations in environmental adaptatio...

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) path planners have been extensively studied for their effectiveness and high concurrency. However, when there are many obstacles, the path can easily violate constraints during the evo...

In this article we demonstrate that acceleration and deceleration of direction-turning drones at waypoints have a significant influence to path planning which is important to be considered for time-critical applications, such as drone-supported searc...

Temperature is often used to infer how climate influences wildlife distributions; yet, other parameters also contribute, separately and combined, with effects varying across geographical scales. Here, we used an unoccupied aircraft system to explore...

Anthropogenic marine debris (AMD) represent a global threat for aquatic environments. It is important to locate and monitor the distribution and presence of macroplastics along beaches to prevent degradation into microplastics (MP), which are potenti...

Deploying Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in safety- and business-critical operations requires demonstrating compliance with applicable regulations and a comprehensive understanding of the residual risk associated with the UAS operation. To support t...

Elucidating the various behavioral and ecological uses of animal habitats is the basis for the conservation and management of animal species. Therefore, tracking the movement of animals is necessary. Biotelemetry is used for tracking the movement of...

In order to provide Internet access to rural areas and places without a reliable economic electricity grid, self-sustainable drone-based cellular networks have recently been presented. However, the difficulties of power consumption and mission planni...

The article reviews the problem of landing on hard-to-reach and poorly developed territories, especially in the case of unmanned aerial vehicles. Various landing systems and approaches are analyzed, and their key advantages and disadvantages are summ...

This paper considers the self-localization of a tethered drone without using a cable-tension force sensor in GPS-denied environments. The original problem is converted to a state-estimation problem, where the cable-tension force and the three-dimensi...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) enable detailed historical preservation of large-scale infrastructure and contribute to cultural heritage preservation, improved maintenance, public relations, and development planning. Aerial and terrestrial photo data...

In the near future, it’s expected that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will become ubiquitous surrogates for human-crewed vehicles in the field of border patrol, package delivery, etc. Therefore, many three-dimensional (3D) navigation algorithms base...

In this paper, a fault diagnosis algorithm named improved one-dimensional deep residual shrinkage network with a wide convolutional layer (1D-WIDRSN) is proposed for quadrotor propellers with minor damage, which can effectively identify the fault cla...

Uncooled thermal imaging sensors in the LWIR (7.5 μm to 14 μm) have recently been developed for use with small RPAS. This study derives a new thermal imaging validation methodology via the use of a blackbody source (indoors) and real-world field cond...

A key challenge in human–swarm interaction is to design a usable interface that allows the human operators to monitor and control a scalable swarm. In our study, we restrict the interactions to only one-to-one communications in local neighborhoods be...

Fire monitoring and early detection are critical tasks in which Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are commonly employed. This paper presents a system to plan the drone patrolling schedule according to a real-time estimation of a fire propagation index...

The article discusses the UAV lateral motion stabilization system, as a MIMO multiloop multirate continuous-discrete system, specified in the form of an input–output model in the domain of discrete Laplace transform or in the form of a structural dia...

In recent years, the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased dramatically. UAVs can accomplish complex or dangerous tasks in a reliable and cost-effective way but are still limited by power consumption problems, which pose seri...

The fundamental issue for Beyond fifth Generation (B5G) is providing a pervasive connection to heterogeneous and various devices in smart environments. Therefore, Drones play a vital role in the B5G, allowing for wireless broadcast and high-speed com...

A census of endangered plant populations is critical to determining their size, spatial distribution, and geographical extent. Traditional, on-the-ground methods for collecting census data are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. Use of dr...

This study justifies the prospect of using aerial imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for technological monitoring and operational control of municipal solid waste landfills. It presents the results of surveys (aerial imagery) of a number of...

This paper proposes novel distributed control methods to address coverage and flocking problems in three-dimensional (3D) environments using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Two classes of coverage problems are considered in this work, namel...

Drones equipped with a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver for absolute localization provide high-precision autonomous flight and hovering. However, the GNSS signal reception sensitivity is considerably lower in areas such as those bet...

Aerial drones have improved significantly over the recent decades with stronger and smaller motors, more powerful propellers, and overall optimization of systems. These improvements have consequently increased top speeds and improved a variety of per...

Uncooled thermal infrared sensors are increasingly being deployed on unmanned aerial systems (UAS) for agriculture, forestry, wildlife surveys, and surveillance. The acquisition of thermal data requires accurate and uniform testing of equipment to en...

In this paper, we propose a coverage method for the search of lost targets or debris on the ocean surface. The OSCAR data set is used to determine the marine currents and the differential evolution genetic filter is used to optimize the sweep directi...

Localization and mapping technologies are of great importance for all varieties of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform their operations. In the near future, it is planned to increase the use of micro/nano-size UAVs. Such vehicles are sometimes...

Detecting and quantifying methane emissions is gaining an increasingly vital role in mitigating emissions for the oil and gas industry through early detection and repair and will aide our understanding of how emissions in natural ecosystems are playi...

Background: The present work aims at obtaining an approximate early production estimate of olive orchards used for extra virgin olive oil production by combining image analysis techniques with light drone images acquisition and photogrammetric recons...

In this work, we introduce a microscopic traffic flow model called Scalar Capacity Model (SCM) which can be used to study the formation of traffic on an airway link for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as well as for the ground vehicles on...

UAV-based photogrammetry has many applications today. Measuring of snow depth using Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques is one of them. Determining the depth of snow is very important for a wide range of scientific research activities. In the alpi...

LiDAR technology has been proven to be an effective remote sensing technique for forest inventory and management. Among existing remote sensing platforms, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are rapidly gaining popularity for their capability to provide h...

With the development of underwater technology, it is important to develop a wide range of autonomous and remotely operated underwater vehicles for various tasks. Depending on the problem that needs to be solved, vehicles will have different designs a...

Drones are increasingly becoming a ubiquitous feature of society. They are being used for a multiplicity of applications for military, leisure, economic, and academic purposes. Their application in academia, especially as social science research tool...

In recent years, small-scale drones have been used in heterogeneous tasks, such as border control, precision agriculture, and search and rescue. This is mainly due to their small size that allows for easy deployment, their low cost, and their increas...

This paper presents a low-cost and cloud-based autonomous drone system to survey and monitor aquaculture sites. We incorporated artificial intelligence (AI) services using computer vision and combined various deep learning recognition models to achie...

Monitoring rare plant species is used to confirm presence, assess health, and verify population trends. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are ideal tools for monitoring rare plants because they can efficiently collect data without impacting the plant or...

The use of multirotor drones has increased dramatically in the last decade. These days, quadcopters and Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) drones can be found in many applications such as search and rescue, inspection, commercial photography, intell...

Autonomous navigation of micro aerial vehicles in unknown environments not only requires exploring their time-varying surroundings, but also ensuring the complete safety of flights at all times. The current research addresses estimation of the potent...

Using aerial platforms for Non-Destructive Inspection (NDI) of large and complex structures is a growing field of interest in various industries. Infrastructures such as: buildings, bridges, oil and gas, etc. refineries require regular and extensive...

The overall safety of a building can be effectively evaluated through regular inspection of the indoor walls by unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). However, when the UGV performs line patrol inspections according to the specified path, it is easy to be...

This work proposes a fully integrated ecosystem composed of three main components with a complex goal: to implement an autonomous system with a UAV requiring little to no maintenance and capable of flying autonomously. For this goal, was developed an...

With the development of photogrammetry technologies, point clouds have found a wide range of use in academic and commercial areas. This situation has made it essential to extract information from point clouds. In particular, artificial intelligence a...

Waterfowl surveys, especially for endangered waterfowl living in wetlands, are essential to protect endangered waterfowl and to create a management scenario of their habitats. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are powerful new tools for waterfowl surve...