Drones, Volume 9, Issue 3

Currently, autonomous flight control for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has become increasingly critical in remote-sensing applications, such as high-resolution data acquisition and road disease detection. However, this task also faces significant c...

The integrity of earth infrastructure, encompassing slopes, dams, pavements, and embankments, is fundamental to the functioning of transportation networks, energy systems, and urban development. However, these infrastructures are increasingly threate...

UAV infrared sensor technology plays an irreplaceable role in various fields. High-altitude infrared images present significant challenges for feature extraction due to their uniform texture and color, fragile and variable edge information, numerous...

Hypersonic unmanned flight vehicles have complex dynamic characteristics, such as nonlinearity, strong coupling, multiple constraints, and uncertainty. Operating in highly complex flight environments, hypersonic unmanned flight vehicles must not only...

This article proposes an observer-based predefined-time robust formation controller for uncertain multi-UAV systems with external disturbances by integrating the sliding-mode technique with neural networks. The predefined-time strategy is developed t...

This systematic review explores the integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and artificial intelligence (AI) in automating road signage inventory creation, employing the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISM...

The estimation of Above-Ground Biomass (AGB) in Amorphophallus konjac (Konjac) is essential for field management and yield prediction. While previous research has demonstrated the efficacy of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) RGB imagery in estimating AG...

Multi-UAV path planning presents a critical challenge in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) applications, particularly in environments with various obstacles and restrictions. These conditions transform multi-UAV path planning into a complex optimization...

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm dynamic combat poses significant challenges due to its complexity and dynamism. This study introduces a novel approach that addresses these challenges through the development of a swarm maneuver decision method bas...

Existing aerial forest fire monitoring data primarily consist of infrared or visible light images. However, there is a lack of in-depth research on the ability of models to perceive fire regions across different spectral images. To address this, we f...

The detection and localization of radiation sources in urban areas present significant challenges in electromagnetic spectrum operations, particularly with the proliferation of small UAVs. To address these challenges, we propose the Multi-UAV Reconna...

With the development of drone and image recognition technologies, using drones to capture images for engineering structural damage detection can replace inefficient and unsafe manual maintenance inspections. This paper focuses on the pairing method b...

In drone countermeasure systems, drone tracking is commonly conducted using object detection methods, which are typically limited to identifying the presence of a drone. To enhance the performance of such systems and improve the accuracy of drone fli...

The Internet of Drones (IoD) integrates autonomous aerial platforms with security, logistics, agriculture, and disaster relief. Decision-making in IoD suffers in real-time adaptability, platform interoperability, and scalability. Conventional decisio...

In general, path planning for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is modeled as a challenging optimization problem that is critical to ensuring efficient UAV mission execution. The challenge lies in the complexity and uncertainty of flight scenarios, par...

Existing RGB image-based object detection methods achieve high accuracy when objects are static or in quasi-static conditions but demonstrate degraded performance with fast-moving objects due to motion blur artifacts. Moreover, state-of-the-art deep...

Convex optimization has gained increasing popularity in trajectory planning methods for wide-speed range unmanned aerial systems (UASs) with multiple no-fly zones (NFZs) in the entry phase. To address the issues of slow or even infeasible solutions,...

Deploying high-performance image restoration models on drones is critical for applications like autonomous navigation, surveillance, and environmental monitoring. However, the computational and memory limitations of drones pose significant challenges...

With the wide application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the military and civilian fields, the physical layer security of UAV-assisted communication has attracted more and more attention in recent years. Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS...

In urban environments, the highly complex communication environment often leads to blockages in the link between ground users (GUs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), resulting in poor communication quality. Although traditional reconfigurable inte...

With the continuous progress of UAV technology and the rapid development of mobile edge computing (MEC), the UAV-assisted MEC system has shown great application potential in special fields such as disaster rescue and emergency response. However, trad...

Bridges are critical components of modern infrastructure, yet their long-term performance is often compromised by thermal stresses induced by environmental and material factors. Despite advances in remote sensing, characterizing the complex thermal d...

The accurate and reliable localization and tracking of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are essential for the success of various underwater missions, such as environmental monitoring, subsea resource exploration, and military operations. long-ba...

Obstacle avoidance is crucial for the successful completion of UAV missions. Static and dynamic obstacles, such as trees, buildings, flying birds, or other UAVs, can threaten these missions. As a result, safe path planning is essential, particularly...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become indispensable across various industries, but their efficiency, particularly in multirotor designs, remains constrained by aerodynamic limitations. This study investigates the integration of airfoil shapes i...

Minimizing experimental data while maintaining good AUV path-following performance is essential to reduce controller design costs and ensure AUV safety, particularly in complex and dynamic underwater environments with unknown ocean currents. To addre...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in applications such as land assessment, surveillance, and rescue operations, where they are often required to cover multiple disjoint regions. Coverage Path Planning (CPP) aims to determine optimal pat...

This paper proposes a novel joint precoding and artificial noise design framework for generalized spatial directional modulation (AN-GSDM) in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications, aimed at enhancing the physical-layer security of downlink UAV...

This paper proposes a novel reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted downlink hybrid free-space optics (FSO)/radio frequency (RF) space–air–ground integrated network (SAGIN) architecture, where the high altitude platform (HAP) co...

Rail systems are essential for economic growth and regional connectivity, but aging infrastructures face challenges from increased demand and environmental factors. Traditional inspection methods, such as visual inspections, are inefficient and costl...

Extracting accurate surface reflectance from multispectral UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) imagery is a fundamental task in remote sensing. However, most studies have focused on short-endurance UAVs, with limited attention given to long-endurance UAVs...

Cross-media vehicles, which combine the advantages of airplanes and submarines, are capable of performing complex tasks in different media and have attracted significant interest in recent years. In practice, however, cross-media rotorcrafts face num...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely employed across diverse fields due to their flexibility and scalability. However, achieving full autonomy remains a challenge as human intervention is still required in most scenarios. Motion planning, a cor...

With the rapid development of e-commerce, logistics UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have shown great potential in the field of urban logistics. However, the large-scale operation of logistics UAVs has brought challenges to air traffic management, and...

The temperature-based crop water stress index (CWSI) is the most robust metric among precise techniques that assess the severity of crop water stress, particularly in susceptible crops like maize. This study used a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to re...

River morphology is highly dynamic, requiring accurate datasets and models for effective management, especially in flood-prone regions. Climate change and urbanisation have intensified flooding events, increasing risks to populations and infrastructu...

In response to the increasing safety concerns posed by low, slow, and small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the use of flexible nets for interception emerges as a promising solution due to its high tolerance, minimal requirements, and cost-effective...

Faults in the DC drive circuit of UAV electro-hydrostatic actuators directly affect the flight safety of a UAV. An integrated learning and Bayesian network-based fault diagnosis strategy is proposed to address the problems of early fault diagnosis, p...

The localization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a critical area of research, particularly in applications requiring high accuracy and reliability in Global Positioning System (GPS)-denied environments. This paper presents a comprehensive overv...

In this paper, we propose a physics-informed neural network controller for quadcopter dynamics modeling. Physics-aware machine learning methods, such as physics-informed neural networks, consider the UAV dynamics model, solving the system of ordinary...

The accurate estimation of aboveground biomass (AGB) is essential for monitoring crop growth and supporting precision agriculture. Traditional AGB estimation methods relying on single spectral indices (SIs) or statistical models often fail to address...

In this paper, delay Doppler (DD) domain is utilized for enabling an efficient handover-triggering mechanism in highly dynamic unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones to ground networks. In the proposed scheme, the estimated DD channel gains using...

In this paper, we adopt the fuzzy actor–critic learning (FACL) and model predictive control (MPC) algorithms to solve the pursuit–evasion game (PEG) of quadrotors. FACL is used for perception, decision-making, and predicting the trajector...

This paper presents a two-step robust fault-tolerant controller of incorporating disturbances and actuator faults rejection for a UAV flight control system, which is challenging due to its complex and nonlinear dynamics. First, the main controller, w...

Unmanned articulated vehicles play a crucial role in the intelligent mine system and have been extensively investigated and implemented in the fields of mine transportation, agriculture and forestry construction. However, the working environment of a...

Unmanned aerial vehicles must achieve precise flight maneuvers despite disturbances, parametric uncertainties, modeling inaccuracies, and limitations in onboard sensor information. This paper presents a robust adaptive control for trajectory tracking...

This study deals with the path-following guidance of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial system (UAS) in conjunction with parameter adaptation. Utilizing a backstepping control design approach, a path-following control algorithm is formulated for the roll c...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a crucial role in enhancing network coverage and capacity, especially in areas with high user density or limited infrastructure. This paper proposes an effective UAV-assisted offloading framework to minimize the e...

Transport by unmanned aerial systems (UASs) (e.g., drones) could save time and personnel. Our study aimed to assess the effect of drone transportation on the clinical laboratory results of biological samples by examining its impact on pre-analytical...

Aiming at the path planning problem of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in a complex unknown environment, this paper proposes a cooperative path planning algorithm for multiple UAVs. Using the local environment information, several rolling path plann...