Drones, Volume 7, Issue 3

Drones have become a crucial research tool across marine environments over the past decade, being specifically useful in marine mammal research. Fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) have been monitored feeding along the Catalan coast, Spain (NW Mediter...

Path planning is one of the key parts of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fast autonomous flight in cluttered environments. However, it remains a challenge to efficiently generate a high-quality trajectory for flight tasks with a high success rate. In t...

An island logistics system is vulnerable in emergency conditions and even isolated from land logistics. Drone-based distribution is an emerging solution investigated in this study to transport packages from a land base to the islands. Considering the...

Multi-UAV cooperative path planning can improve the efficiency of task completion. To deal with the space and time conflicts of multi-UAVs in complex environments, a multi-collision-based multi-UAV cooperative path planning algorithm, multi-conflict-...

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm has broad application prospects, in which scheduling is one of the key technologies determining the completion of tasks. A market-based approach is an effective way to schedule UAVs distributively and quickly, m...

Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is an active remote sensing technique that typically utilises satellite data to quantify Earth surface and structural deformation. Drone InSAR should provide improved spatial-temporal data resolutions...

Wireless communication networks have been witnessing unprecedented demand due to the increasing number of connected devices and emerging bandwidth-hungry applications. Although there are many competent technologies for capacity enhancement purposes,...

Traditional multi-access edge computing (MEC) often has difficulty processing large amounts of data in the face of high computationally intensive tasks, so it needs to offload policies to offload computation tasks to adjacent edge servers. The comput...

UAVs are becoming increasingly used in the field of structural health monitoring, and the position information of them during the tasks is crucial. However, in complex scenarios such as bridges and high-rise buildings, the GNSS positioning method can...

Mobile robots, including ground robots, underwater robots, and unmanned aerial vehicles, play an increasingly important role in people’s work and lives. Path planning and obstacle avoidance are the core technologies for achieving autonomy in mo...

The employment of unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as UAVs, is expanding rapidly across various civil application areas. Some of these domains include real-time tracking, the provision of wireless coverage, sensing, searches and rescue, the deliv...

Over the years, many ellipse detection algorithms have been studied broadly, while the critical problem of accurately and effectively detecting ellipses in the real-world using robots remains a challenge. In this paper, we proposed a valuable real-ti...

(1) Regular wildlife abundance surveys are a key conservation tool. Manned aircraft flying transects often remain the best alternative for counting large ungulates. Drones have cheaper and safer logistics, however their range is generally too short f...

Today, invasive alien species cause serious trouble for biodiversity and ecosystem services, which are essential for human survival. In order to effectively manage invasive species, it is important to know their current distribution and the dynamics...

Island territories and their coastal regions are subject to a wide variety of stresses, both natural and anthropogenic. With increasing pressures on these vulnerable environments, the need to improve our knowledge of these ecosystems increases as wel...

This paper investigates the multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (multi-UAV) cooperative task assignment problem. Specifically, we assign different types of UAVs to accomplish the classification, attack, and verification tasks of targets under resource,...

Recently, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has become a highly sought-after topic for its wide applications in target recognition, detection, and tracking. However, SAR automatic target recognition (ATR) models based o...

With unmanned aerial vehicle(s) (UAV), swift responses to urgent needs (such as search and rescue missions or medical deliveries) can be realized. Simultaneously, legislators are establishing so-called geographical zones, which restrict UAV operation...

The use of UAVs for monitoring and inspection in the construction industry has garnered considerable attention in recent years due to their potential to enhance safety, efficiency, and accuracy. The development and application of various types of dro...

This paper presents an architecture for controlling a quadrotor transporting a cable-suspended load of uncertain mass. A family of trajectories is proposed that is composed by three phases—lift-off, transit, and landing—and implemented as a hybrid sy...

The aim of the paper is to validate the analytical–numerical analysis method regarding the operating regime of the propellers of a quadcopter. The research aims to mark the flow areas whose numerical results differ from the experimental ones an...

This paper proposes an innovative automatic carrier landing control law for carrier-based aircraft considering complex ship motion and wind environment. Specifically, a strategy is proposed to synthesize preview control with an adaptive nonlinear con...

For the stability analysis of rock slope, it is very critical to obtain the spatial geometric characteristics of the structural surfaces of the rock mass accurately and effectively. As for a high-steep rock slope of an iron ore mine, in order to solv...

This paper studies the consensus tracking control for a class of uncertain high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems under an undirected leader-following architecture. A novel distributed finite-time adaptive control framework is proposed based on the...

In this paper, an intelligent algorithm integrating model predictive control and Standoff algorithm is proposed to solve trajectory planning that UAVs may face while tracking a moving target cooperatively in a complex three-dimensional environment. A...

This is an editorial for a Special Issue of Drones titled “Advances in UAV Detection, Classification and Tracking” [...]

To enable a carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to track the desired glide trajectory and safely land on the deck with the presence of system faults, this paper proposes a neural network-based adaptive sliding mode fault-tolerant control (NAS...

Autonomous flight for quadrotors is maturing with the development of real-time local trajectory planning. However, the current local planning method is too conservative to waste the agility of the quadrotors. So in this paper, we have focused on aggr...

The demand for autonomous UAV swarm operations has been on the rise following the success of UAVs in various challenging tasks. Yet conventional swarm control approaches are inadequate for coping with swarm scalability, computational requirements, an...

The use of drones for package delivery, commonly known as drone delivery or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) delivery, has gained significant attention from academia and industries. Compared to traditional delivery methods, it provides greater flexibili...

In recent decades, scientific and technological developments have continued to increase in speed, with researchers focusing not only on the innovation of single technologies but also on the cross-fertilization of multidisciplinary technologies. Unman...

Road cracks are one of the external manifestations of safety hazards in transportation. At present, the detection and segmentation of road cracks is still an intensively researched issue. With the development of image segmentation technology of the c...

A multi-scale UAV aerial image object detection model MS-YOLOv7 based on YOLOv7 was proposed to address the issues of a large number of objects and a high proportion of small objects that commonly exist in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) aerial ima...

The use of drones is becoming increasingly popular in various fields. In the case of education, initiatives have emerged in which they are included as tools to develop student’s knowledge, and their use is becoming more frequent. This research...

Drones can be very helpful in precision agriculture. Currently, most drone-based solutions for plant disease detection incorporate multispectral, hyperspectral, or thermal cameras, which are expensive. In addition, there is a trend nowadays to apply...

Formation control is a prerequisite for the formation to complete specified tasks safely and efficiently. Considering non-symmetrical communication interference and network congestion, this article aims to design a control protocol by studying the fo...

Numerous attempts have been made to extend the endurance of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by improving their propulsion system. However, due to their non-linear setup, no study has been conducted on small electric UAVs’ architecture fra...

Pine wilt disease (PWD) has become increasingly serious recently and causes great damage to the world’s pine forest resources. The use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based remote sensing helps to identify pine nematode trees in time and has b...

In this study, we realized a relay network using drones and analyzed the impact of the sway angle of a drone’s attitude on communication in a windy flight environment. Drones in flight act as radio relay stations and communication among them is perfo...

As the core of electric propulsion in drones, the motor has higher requirements for its reliability and fault tolerance. Accurate acquisition of rotor position information is a prerequisite for a motor-driven drone’s system to operate stably. T...

In this paper, a four-dimensional (4D) dynamic cooperative path planning algorithm for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proposed, in which the cooperative time variables of UAVs, as well as conflict and threat avoidance, are considered. Th...

In the last decade, small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs/drones) have become increasingly popular in the airborne observation of large areas for many purposes, such as the monitoring of agricultural areas, the tracking of wild animals in their natura...

This study identified and evaluated the association between metal content and UAV data to monitor pollution from roadways. A total of 18 mixed snow samples were collected at the end of winter, utilizing a 1 m long and 10 cm wide snow collection tube,...

We address the problem of coordinated vision-based tracking of a moving target using multiple unmanned vehicles that exchange information over a supporting time-varying network. The objective of this work is to formulate decentralized control algorit...

Non-terrestrial network (NTN) systems can offer wide area coverage for applications requiring high mobility, which is expected in the sixth generation (6G) of telecommunication systems. This paper proposes a high-mobility support system based on the...

Drones have many applications in our daily lives and can be employed for agricultural, military, commercial, disaster relief, research and development, and many other purposes. There has been a significant increase in the usage of small drones/unmann...

Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), as well as Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) or also Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs), later on simply called drones, have reached a sufficient degree of maturity to allow their use for various purposes [...]

The segmentation of crop disease zones is an important task of image processing since the knowledge of the growth status of crops is critical for agricultural management. Nowadays, images taken by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used...

Aiming at anti Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm, this paper studies the detection and suppression mechanisms of emergence in cooperative flight. Cooperative fly is one of the critical operations for UAV swarm in both military and civilian utilitie...

In this paper, a real-time dynamic programming (RTDP) approach was developed for the first time to jointly carry a slung load using two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with a trajectory optimized for time and energy consumption. The novel strategy ap...