Drones, Volume 6, Issue 12

Among the key technologies of Multi-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) leader–follower formation control, formation reconfiguration technology is an important element to ensure that multiple UAVs can successfully complete their missions in a complex...

Pedestrian detection and tracking are critical functions in the application of computer vision for autonomous driving in terms of accident avoidance and safety. Extending the application to drones expands the monitoring space from 2D to 3D but compli...

Accurate terrain models are critical for studying the formation and development of slot canyons. However, for slot canyon landforms, it is challenging to generate comprehensive and high-resolution morphological data by individual observation due to t...

The control of an aerial flexible joint robot (FJR) manipulator system with underactuation is a difficult task due to unavoidable factors, including, coupling, underactuation, nonlinearities, unmodeled uncertainties, and unpredictable external distur...

RPAS (Remotely piloted aircraft systems, i.e., drones) present an efficient method for mapping schooling coastal forage fish species that have limited distribution and abundance data. However, RPAS imagery acquisition in marine environments is highly...

Field surveys in wetlands are limited by the difficulty in accessing the site, hazards during surveys, and the risk of disturbing the ecosystem. Thus, the use of unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) can overcome these limiting factors and can assist in...

Next generation mobile networks are expected to integrate multiple drones organized in Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) to support demanding and diverse services. The highly mobile drones should always be connected to the network in order to satisfy t...

Updated concrete construction robots are designed to optimize equipment operation, improve safety, enhance workspace awareness, and further ensure a proper working environment for construction workers. The importance of concrete construction robots h...

Timely and accurate prediction of crop yield prior to harvest is vital for precise agricultural management. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide a fast and convenient approach to crop yield prediction, but most existing crop yield models have rare...

Remote-sensing processes based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have opened up new possibilities to both map and extract individual plant parameters. This is mainly due to the high spatial data resolution and acquisition flexibility of UAVs. Among t...

Rapid advancements in the fifth generation (5G) communication technology and mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm have led to the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in urban air mobility (UAM) networks, which provide intelligent services...

Facility inspections are mainly carried out through manual visual inspections. However, it is difficult to determine the extent of damages to facilities, and it depends on the subjective opinion of the manager in charge of the monitoring. Additionall...

This paper investigates the formation tracking control of multiple agents with a double-integrator model and presents a novel distributed control framework composed of three items: a potential-based gradient term, a formation term, and a navigation t...

In this paper, a novel geometrical localization scheme based on the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is developed for a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Since RSSI-based localization does not require complicated hardware, it is the...

The application of drones provides a powerful solution for “the last-mile” logistics services, while the large-scale implementation of logistics drone services will threaten the safety of buildings, pedestrians, vehicles, and other elemen...

Possibly the most critical phase of an Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) flight is landing. To reduce the risk due to pilot error, autonomous landing systems can be used. Environmental disturbances such as wind shear can jeopardize safe landing, therefore a...

Aiming at the existing problem of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aerial photography for riders’ helmet wearing detection, a novel aerial remote sensing detection paradigm is proposed by combining super-resolution reconstruction, residual transfo...

The recovery phase following an earthquake event is essential for urban areas with a significant number of damaged buildings. A lot of changes can take place in such a landscape within the buildings’ footprints, such as total or partial collaps...

Extracting accurate tie points plays an essential role in the accuracy of image orientation in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry. In this study, a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) automatic filtering method is presented. Based on the...

Currently, firefighter drones in Republic of Korea underperform due to the lack of take-off site reservations in advance. In order to address this issue, this study proposes a GIS-based multi-criteria model for selecting take-off and landing sites fo...

Copter-type UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) or drones are expected to become more and more popular for deliveries of small goods in urban areas. One strategy to reduce the risks of drone collisions is to constrain their movements to a drone road syst...

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are becoming more attractive in diverse applications due to their efficiency in performing tasks with a reduced time execution, covering a larger area, and lowering human risks at harmful tasks. In the context of Oil &am...

In this work, we design an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) by enabling non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) approaches. We pay attention to studying the achievable rates for t...

Demographic Information on threatened species is important to plan conservation actions. Due to their aquatic lifestyle, the subtle nature of hippo sexual dimorphism, and their occurrence in inaccessible areas, it is difficult to visually determine h...

The drone-based multi-modal inspection of industrial structures is a relatively new field of research gaining interest among companies. Multi-modal inspection can significantly enhance data analysis and provide a more accurate assessment of the compo...

In the last few years, uncrewed aerial systems (UASs) have been broadly employed for many applications including urban traffic monitoring. However, in the detection, tracking, and geolocation of moving vehicles using UAVs there are problems to be enc...

This paper proposes the use of quasi-stationary aircraft and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) to improve the system performance in satellite–terrestrial laser communication downlink. Single-input multiple-output (SIMO) technology is ap...

Currently, the main in situ upper air database for numerical weather prediction relies on radiosonde and aircraft-based information. Typically, radiosondes are launched at specific sites daily, up to four times per day, and data are distributed world...

Topographic maps provide detailed information on variations in ground elevation, which is essential for precision farmland levelling. This paper reports the development and experimental study on an innovative approach of generating topographic maps a...

An efficient control of large-scale unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm to establish a complex formation is one of the most challenging tasks. This paper investigates a novel multi-layer topology network and consensus control approach for a large-sca...

Bottle marine debris (BMD) remains one of the most pressing global issues. This study proposes a detection method for BMD using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and machine learning techniques to enhance the efficiency of marine debris studies. The UAV...

In the design of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication systems, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a commonly used communication technology. An efficient channel estimation and equalization algorithm is required to recover the...

Pedicularis has adverse effects on vegetation growth and ecological functions, causing serious harm to animal husbandry. In this paper, an automated detection method is proposed to extract Pedicularis and reveal the spatial distribution. Based on unm...

Flapping wing systems are being developed by various institutions and research groups around the world with many systems developed that are capable of full flight. However, while instrumentation has been developed that is capable of measuring some of...

The application of intravehicular robotic assistants (IRA) can save valuable working hours for astronauts in space stations. There are various types of IRA, such as an accompanying drone working in microgravity and a dexterous humanoid robot for coll...

Rodent pests cause extensive damage to agricultural crops worldwide. Farmers’ ability to monitor rodent activity and damage within crops is limited due to their inability to simultaneously survey vast agricultural areas for rodent activity, the...

Drones are increasingly used for a wide range of applications including mapping, monitoring, detection, tracking and videography. Drone software and flight mission programs are, however, still largely marketed for “urban” use such as prop...

Uncooled thermal cameras have been employed as common UAV payloads for aerial temperature surveillance in recent years. Due to the lack of internal cooling systems, such cameras often suffer from thermal-drift-induced nonuniformity or vignetting desp...

With the advancement of technology and the rise of the unmanned aerial vehicle industry, the use of drones has grown tremendously. For drones performing near-ground delivery missions, the problem of 3D space-based path planning is particularly import...

A vertical take-off and landing plane (VTOL plane) is a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (FWUAV) configuration with the ability to take off and land vertically. It combines the benefits of fixed-wing and multirotor configurations, which gives it a...

Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for planetary exploration missions require increased onboard mission-planning and decision-making capabilities to access full operational potential in remote environments (e.g., Antarctica, Mars or Titan). Ho...

This paper deals with the references generation for a team of unmanned aerial vehicles tethered to a ground station for inspection applications. In order to deploy the team of vehicles in a suitable location to cover the largest area, each vehicle is...

There are multiple participants, such as farmers, wholesalers, retailers, financial institutions, etc., involved in the modern food production process. All of these participants and stakeholders have a shared goal, which is to gather information on t...

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) are used in a variety of applications with the aim of mapping detailed surfaces from the air. Despite the high level of map automation achieved today, there are still challenges in the accuracy of georeferencing that c...

The new concept of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and the emergent unmanned aerial vehicles are receiving more and more attention by several stakeholders for implementing new transport solutions. However, there are several issues to solve in order to imple...

A low-cost, yet accurate approach for stockpile volume estimation within confined storage spaces is presented. The novel approach relies on actuating a single-point light detecting and ranging (1D LiDAR) sensor using a micro servo motor onboard a dro...

Path planning with collision avoidance for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in environments with moving obstacles is a complex process of navigation, often considered a hard optimization problem. Ordinary resolution algorithms may fail to provide flya...

How do the weather conditions typical of the polar maritime glaciers in the western Antarctic Peninsula region affect flight operations of fixed-wing drones and how should these be adapted for a successful flight? We tried to answer this research que...

Pesticides are essential for removing plant pests and sustaining good yields on agricultural land. Excessive use has detrimental repercussions, such as the depletion of soil fertility and the proliferation of immune insect species, such as Nilaparvat...

This paper presents the design and implementation of BAICal (Intelligent Autonomous Buoy by the University of Calabria), an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) developed at the Autonomous Systems Lab (LASA) of the Department of Computer Science, Modelin...