Drones, Volume 9, Issue 4

The widespread deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in modern warfare has profoundly increased the complexity and dynamic nature of aerial combat. To address the limitations of traditional UAV combat intention recognition methods, which rely...

Accurate detection and timely management of high-voltage transmission accessories are crucial for ensuring the safe operation of power transmission. Existing network models suffer from issues like low precision in accessory detection, elevated model...

This paper addresses the event-triggered neuroadaptive bipartite containment tracking problem for networked unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) subject to resource constraints and actuator failures. A fully distributed event-triggered mechanism is innova...

One of the key expectations of AI product manufacturers for their products is the ability to scale to larger markets, especially across legal systems, with fewer prototypes and lower adaptation costs. This paper focuses on the increasingly dynamic le...

The floodplain of a large river plays a crucial role in the river’s ecosystem and serves as an essential microhabitat for river fish to complete their life history events. Over the past four decades, the floodplain represented by the Jingjiang...

Growing awareness of the environmental cost of mining operations has led to increased research on monitoring and restoring legacy mine sites. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has emerged as a valuable tool in the mining life cycle, including post-mining e...

Heterogeneous UAVs offer unique advantages in multi-agent systems due to their varying capabilities including (a) different payload capacities, (b) maneuverability, and (c) flight endurance. These properties made them particularly well suited for com...

Drones are becoming increasingly valuable tools in wildlife studies due to their ability to access remote areas and offer high-resolution information with minimal human interference. Their application is, however, causing concern regarding wildlife d...

The aerial–terrestrial integrated Internet of Things (ATI-IoT) utilizes both aerial platforms (e.g., drones and high-altitude platform stations) and terrestrial networks to establish comprehensive and seamless connectivity across diverse geogra...

Implementing a variable-rate application (VRA) of fertilization based on real-time crop growth status reduces costs and enhances work efficiency. However, the technical challenges associated with obtaining accurate growth-distribution maps and applyi...

As a crucial component in the evolution of modern warfare toward digitization and intelligentization, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipment requires a more precise and efficient operation and maintenance (O&M) system. Based on the Department of...

In this article, the authors conducted electromagnetic radiation research on telecommunication base stations using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Until now, UAVs have only been capable of performing visual inspections, without investigating electri...

This study proposes a novel drone-based semi-airborne total-field magnetometric resistivity (SA-TFMMR) system for high-resolution detection of conductive fracture zones in geologically hazardous terrains. The system integrates a high-power, low-frequ...

Formation flying of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has attracted much attention for its versatility in cooperative tasks. In this paper, a distributed formation planning method is proposed for UAVs. First, we design a path searching algorit...

Soil erosion affects land productivity, water quality, and ecosystem resilience. Traditional monitoring methods are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and resource-demanding, while unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide high-resolution, near-rea...

Existing studies rarely investigate the dynamic morphology factor on motion planning and control, which is crucial for morphing quadrotors to achieve autonomous flight. Therefore, this paper studies the collaborative optimization of trajectory genera...

The rising use of UAVs in various applications has underscored the critical challenge of noise pollution and aerodynamic efficiency. This study explores the dual integration of winglets and serrations on UAV propellers to address these challenges sim...

This study addresses the problem of attitude and altitude tracking for a quadrotor system in the presence of parameter uncertainties. The goal is to develop a robust control strategy that can handle the nonlinear, strongly coupled dynamics of the qua...

Unmanned aerial vehicles, known today as drones, in the beginning, were small-dimension research models powered by small electric motors fed from electrical batteries. The propulsion system for these drones had to be adapted to the specific applicati...

Multi-drone collaborative perception aims to address single-drone viewpoint limitations. The existing matching and association methods based on visual features and spatial topology rely heavily on detection, making it challenging to associate targets...

Currently, it is becoming relevant to use cheap autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to perform various underwater operations (environmental monitoring, aquatic protection, search and tracking of underwater biological objects, etc.). At the same tim...

Plateau pika (Ochotona curzoniae, hereafter pika) is a key species in the alpine grasslands on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP). They are susceptible to the influence of external disturbance and may present great variation, which is important to eva...

To effectively separate low-contrast weak drone objects from complex backgrounds, the IRWT-YOLO model is proposed, in which image segmentation algorithms are leveraged to reduce background interference. The model integrates object detection and image...

Accurate and efficient tree species classification and mapping is crucial for forest management and conservation, especially on the Loess Plateau, where forest quality urgently needs improvement. This study selected three research sites—Yongsho...

Maintenance of offshore wind farms requires the transportation of tools and spare parts in close coordination with the deployment of technicians and the cost-intensive shutdown of the wind turbines. In addition to ships and helicopters, drones are en...

In aerial target-tracking research, complex scenarios place extremely high demands on the precision and robustness of tracking algorithms. Although the existing target-tracking algorithms have achieved good performance in general scenarios, all of th...

In Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) target detection tasks, issues such as missing and erroneous detections frequently occur owing to the small size of the targets and the complexity of the image background. To improve these issues, an improved target d...

This article focuses on the prescribed performance sliding mode fault-tolerant control problem for an unmanned morphing flight vehicle (MFV) with actuator faults and composite disturbances during wing deformation. Firstly, the longitudinal nonlinear...

Morphological changes during body development measurements are crucial in understanding growth rates, allometric relationships, and sexual dimorphism. Recent advances in drone technology provide a new perspective enabling an indirect, non-invasive mo...

Satellite imagery is a widely used source of spatial information in many applications, such as land use/land cover, object detection, agricultural monitoring, and urban area monitoring. Numerous factors, including projection, tilt angle, scanner, atm...

This paper investigated the configuration of the reflecting elements for uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)–reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) systems. By analyzing the practical air-to-ground (A2G)...

The combination of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) effectively meets the demands of user equipments (UEs) for high-quality computing services, low energy consumption, and low latency. However, in complex environments s...

This paper describes flight planning supported by modeling, guidance, and feedback control for an electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) QuadPlane small Uncrewed Aircraft System (sUAS). Five Lift+Cruise sUAS waypoint types are defined and use...

Plant height and SPAD values are critical indicators for evaluating peanut morphological development, photosynthetic efficiency, and yield optimization. Recent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology advancements have enabled high-throughput phenoty...

This paper summarizes the latest research progress in the field of motion control of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), focusing on three core technologies: path following, trajectory tracking and multi-AUV formation control. Aiming at the extern...

Due to their high efficiency and real-time performance, discriminant correlation filtering (DCF) trackers have been widely applied in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking. However, the robustness of existing trackers is still poor when facing compl...

With the explosive growth of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications in numerous fields, low-altitude networks face formidable challenges in monitoring. In this context, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks through three-dimensiona...

Flapping wing aircrafts have demonstrated unique advantages in military and civil fields due to their bio-inspired flight mechanisms. However, non-uniform wear in driving mechanisms remains a critical reliability concern during prolonged operation. T...

End-to-end autonomous driving has become a key research focus in autonomous vehicles. However, existing methods struggle with effectively fusing heterogeneous sensor inputs and converting dense perceptual features into sparse motion representations....

With the growing demand for delivery services and the escalating labor costs, much effort has been made to achieve faster and cost-efficient delivery. A promising emerging strategy involves the integration of autonomous delivery vehicles or drones in...

Performing long-duration navigation without the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) network is a challenging task, particularly for small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with low-cost micro-electro-mechanical sensors. This study propos...

To address the growing security risks posed by unauthorized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) activities, this paper proposes a real-time two-dimensional direction-finding (DF) system for UAVs based on radio frequency (RF) signals. This system employs a...

Monitoring and management of construction sites are critical to ensuring project success, efficiency, and safety. Traditional methods often struggle to provide real-time, accurate, and comprehensive data, leading to delays, cost overruns, and errors....

To address the formation control issue of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a finite-time control scheme based on terminal sliding mode (TSM) is investigated in this paper. A quadcopter UAV with the vertical takeoff property is considered, wi...

Research on UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) path planning and obstacle avoidance control based on DRL (deep reinforcement learning) still faces limitations, as previous studies primarily utilized current perceptual inputs while neglecting the continuit...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) hold great promise for Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) owing to their flexible mobility, rapid deployment, and low-cost characteristics. However, UAV-enabled MEC still faces challenges in terms of the real-time arrival of...

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have shown significant promise across various underwater applications, yet face challenges in dynamic environments due to the limitations of traditional motion planning methods while Artificial Potential Field (A...

Intelligent swarm is a powerful tool for targeting high-value objectives. Within the Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) context, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm must leverage its autonomous decision-making capability to execute tasks with indepen...

When multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) form a cluster, their flight process is divided into two phases. The first phase is the cruising stage, during which UAVs move from random positions toward the target, gradually forming a spherical topolo...

Accurately monitoring total nitrogen (TN) content in field soils is crucial for precise fertilization management. TN content is one of the core indicators in soil fertility evaluation systems. Rapid and accurate determination of TN in the tillage lay...