Drones, Volume 6, Issue 10

Due to the quadrotor’s underactuated nature, suspended payload dynamics, parametric uncertainties, and external disturbances, designing a controller for tracking the desired trajectories for a quadrotor that carries a suspended payload is a cha...

The multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) system is highly sought after in the fields of emergency rescue and intelligent transportation because of its strong perception and extensive coverage. Formulating a reasonable task scheduling scheme is es...

An energy efficient heterogeneous multirotor unmanned aerial system (UAS) is presented in this paper, wherein, the aerodynamical characteristics of both helicopter and quadrotor are obtained in a single multirotor design. It features the energy effic...

Object detection is important in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) reconnaissance missions. However, since a UAV flies at a high altitude to gain a large reconnaissance view, the captured objects often have small pixel sizes and their categories have hig...

Current unmanned aerial vehicles have been designed by applying the traditional approach to aircraft conceptual design which has drawbacks in terms of the individual analysis of each discipline involved in the conception of new aircraft, the reliance...

Artificial intelligence used in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight control systems tends to leave UAV control systems without any radio communication emissions, whose signatures in an electromagnetic spectrum (ES) are widely used to detect UAVs. Th...

In order to operate safely in windy and gusty conditions, multirotor VTOL aircraft require gust resilience. This paper shows that their gust rejection properties can be improved by applying a small amount of fixed outward rotor tilt. Standard aerodyn...

In this paper, an unmanned aerial vehicle is utilized as an aerial relay to connect onshore base station with offshore users in a maritime IoT system with uplink non-orthogonal multiple access enabled. A coordinated direct and relay transmission sche...

Aerial seeding based on the unmanned agricultural aerial system (UAAS) improves the seeding efficiency of oilseed rape (OSR) seeds, and solves the problem of OSR planting in mountainous areas where it is inconvenient to use ground seeding machines. T...

Unlike bigger aircraft, the small fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles face significant stability challenges in a turbulent environment. To improve the flight performance, a fixed-wing UAV with segmented aileron control surfaces has been designed and...

Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, are already an integral part of the equipment used by firefighters to monitor wildfires. They are, however, still typically used only as remotely operated, mobile sensing platforms under direct real-time control o...

We propose a neural network consensus strategy to solve the leader–follower problem for multiple-rotorcraft unmanned aircraft systems (UASs), where the goal of this work was to improve the learning based on a set of auxiliary variables and firs...

UAV imaging provides an efficient and non-destructive tool for characterizing farm information, but the quality of the UAV model is often affected by the image’s spatial resolution. In this paper, the predictability of models established using...

This paper proposes a new algorithm to solve the control problem for a special class of distance-based directed formations, namely directed-triangulated Laman graphs. The central idea of the algorithm is to construct a virtual point for the agents wh...

Drone developments, especially small-sized drones, usher in novel trends and possibilities in various domains. Drones offer navigational inter-location services with the involvement of the Internet of Things (IoT). On the other hand, drone networks a...

In order to analyze the circumnavigation tracking problem in complex three-dimensional space, in this paper, we propose a UAV group circumnavigation control strategy, in which the UAV circumnavigation orbit is an ellipse whose size can be adjusted ar...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely applied over the past decades, especially in the military field. Due to the unpredictability of the flight environment and failures, higher requirements are placed on the design of the control system o...

A unique drone-based system for underwater mapping (bathymetry) was developed at the University of Florida. The system, called the “Bathy-drone”, comprises a drone that drags, via a tether, a small vessel on the water surface in a raster...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now extensively used in a wide variety of applications, including a key role within opportunistic wireless networks. These types of opportunistic networks are considered well suited for infrastructure-less areas, o...

To solve the problem of low detection accuracy of small objects in UAV optical remote sensing images due to low contrast, dense distribution, and weak features, this paper proposes a small object detection method based on feature alignment of candida...

Quantifying the capacity of protected area networks to shield multiple marine megafauna with diverse life histories is complicated, as many species are wide-ranging, requiring varied monitoring approaches. Yet, such information is needed to identify...

At this time, many illegal activities are being been carried out, such as illegal mining, hunting, logging, and forest burning. These things can have a substantial negative impact on the environment. These illegal activities are increasingly rampant...

Livestock management is an emerging area of application of the quadrotor, especially for monitoring, counting, detecting, recognizing, and tracking animals through image or video footage. The autonomous operation of the quadrotor requires the develop...

Profiling wind information when using a small unmanned aerial vehicle (sUAV) is vital for atmospheric profiling and monitoring attitude during flight. Wind speed on an sUAV can be measured directly using ultrasonic anemometers or by calculating its a...

The error level of inertial sensor parameters determines the navigation accuracy of an inertial navigation system. For many applications, such as drones, errors in horizontal gyroscopes and accelerometers, can significantly affect the navigation resu...

In this study, we propose a multirotor aerial robot for high-pressure washing tasks at high altitudes. The aerial robot consists of a multirotor platform, an add-on planar translational driving system (ATD), a visual sensing system, and a high-pressu...

This paper aims to describe the methodology used in the design and manufacture of a fixed-wing aircraft manufactured using additive techniques together with the implementation of technology based on solar panels. The main objective is increasing the...

It has been observed that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have been used in a very different way over time. The advancements in key UAV areas include detection (including radio frequency and radar), classification (including mi...

The monitoring of underwater aquatic habitats and pipeline leakages and disaster prevention are assisted by the construction of an underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN). The deployment of underwater sensors consumes energy and causes delay when t...

As interest grows in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems, UAVs have been proposed to take on increasingly more tasks that were previously assigned to humans. One such task is the delivery of goods within urban cities using UAVs, which would otherwi...

Unmanned aerial application systems (UAAS) have recently gained momentum for the application of crop protection (CP) products. Due to their high operational efficiency, mobility, and low cost, UAAS may be perceived as a more viable option for spray a...

This study deals with the decentralized sampled-data fuzzy tracking control of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) considering the communication delay of the feedback signal. A decentralized Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy approach is ado...

This paper presents a time- and cost-efficient method for the management of construction and demolition (C&D) debris at construction sites, demolition jobsites, and illegal C&D waste dumping sites. The developed method integrates various dron...

To govern and ensure the safety of increasing drone operations, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has defined three risk-based categories of unmanned aircraft system (UAS) operations. A large part of commercial UAS operations fall into the S...

Spatial data play a crucial role in archaeological research, and orthophotos, digital elevation models, and 3D models are frequently used for the mapping, documentation, and monitoring of archaeological sites. Thanks to the availability of compact an...

The advancement in computing and telecommunication has broadened the applications of drones beyond military surveillance to other fields, such as agriculture. Livestock farming using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems requires surveillance and mon...

Diagnostic testing to detect forest pathogens requires the collection of physical samples from affected trees, which can be challenging in remote or rugged environments. As an alternative to traditional ground-based sampling at breast height by field...

With the growing reliability of modern ad hoc networks, it is encouraging to analyze the potential involvement of autonomous ad hoc agents in critical situations where human involvement could be perilous. One such critical scenario is the Search and...

In the original publication [...]

An assembly composed of multiple aerial vehicles can realize omnidirectional motion with six degrees of freedom. Such an assembly has a heavier payload capacity and better fault tolerance compared with a single aircraft. Thus, such assemblies have th...

The effectiveness of multiple UAVs at attacking the enemy target and defending against the attacking UAVs simultaneously gained researchers’ attention due to their cost efficiency and high mission success rates. This paper explores the UAV swar...

The growing interest in Artificial Intelligence is pervading several domains of technology and robotics research. Only recently has the space community started to investigate deep learning methods and artificial neural networks for space systems. Thi...

Based on the characteristics of drone swarm such as low cost, strong integrity, and frequent information exchange, as well as the high cost of timely maintenance of traditional units. This paper proposes a swarm maintenance method based on the reliab...

Wetlands play a critical role in maintaining stable and productive ecosystems, and they continue to be at heightened risk from anthropogenic and natural degradation, especially along the rapidly developing Atlantic Coastal Plain of North America. As...

The biophysical parameters of coffee plants can provide important information to guide crop management. An alternative to traditional methods of sparse hand measurements to obtain this type of information can be the 3D modeling of the coffee canopy u...

This paper studies the robust formation flying problem for a swarm of drones, which are modeled as uncertain second order systems. By making use of minimal virtual leader information, a fully distributed robust control scheme is proposed, which inclu...

Robot path planning is one of the core issues in robotics and its application. Optimizing the route discovery becomes more important while dealing with the robot-based application. This paper proposes the concept of early detection of the obstacle pr...

The Internet of Drones (IoD) has recently gained popularity in several military, commercial, and civilian applications due to its unique characteristics, such as high mobility, three-dimensional (3D) movement, and ease of deployment. Drones, on the o...