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UAVs Revolutionizing Smart City Transportation: Innovations, Challenges, and Potential
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UAVs Revolutionizing Smart City Transportation: Innovations, Challenges, and Potential

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Vehicular Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 October 2024) | Viewed by 2723

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Ansar Yasar

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Transportation Research Institute (IMOB), Hasselt University, 3500 Hasselt, Belgium
Interests: ITS; vehicular networks; agent-based modeling; modeling and simulation; transportation behavior
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, play a crucial role in the enhancement of transportation systems for future smart cities. The integration of drones offers numerous opportunities within the transportation sector, with ongoing efforts to discover novel approaches to harness their potential. The majority of these efforts revolve around utilizing camera-equipped UAVs to gather traffic and driving behavior data, which is then utilized for various purposes including surveillance, traffic violation detection, congestion management, signal optimization, and analyzing vehicle trajectories for accident risk assessment and other research inquiries.

This research topic focuses on the latest developments in utilizing UAVs to address traffic and transportation challenges. Specifically, it aims to explore the following questions:

  • How has UAV technology been applied to advance specific transportation-focused research or objectives?
  • What advantages does UAV technology offer compared to traditional methods?
  • What hurdles hinder the widespread adoption of UAV technology for certain objectives and how can these challenges be overcome?

Key areas where the existing technological limitations of UAVs can be enhanced to effectively solve transportation issues.

We invite submissions of original research and review articles concerning the use of UAVs in the context of addressing traffic and transportation problems. Potential areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Innovative utilization of UAVs as communication tools (UAVs-to-Vehicle) to manage traffic in urban and rural settings.
  • Development of advanced algorithms to extract insights from UAV-derived data for purposes like accident investigation, road safety, and traffic engineering.
  • Integration of UAVs and AI to advance the technology of smart and intelligent transportation systems.
  • Applications of UAVs to enhance the service quality of public transport and transit systems.
  • Studies investigating user acceptance and willingness to increase the use of UAVs in transportation domains.
  • Strategies to overcome barriers, limitations, and regulatory challenges to facilitate broad implementation of UAV applications in transportation.

Prof. Dr. Ansar Yasar
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

34 pages, 15986 KiB  
Article
A Comprehensive Framework for Transportation Infrastructure Digitalization: TJYRoad-Net for Enhanced Point Cloud Segmentation
by Zhen Yang, Mingxuan Wang and Shikun Xie
Sensors 2024, 24(22), 7222; https://doi.org/10.3390/s24227222 (registering DOI) - 12 Nov 2024
Viewed by 473
Abstract
This research introduces a cutting-edge approach to traffic infrastructure digitization, integrating UAV oblique photography with LiDAR point clouds for high-precision, lightweight 3D road modeling. The proposed method addresses the challenge of accurately capturing the current state of infrastructure while minimizing redundancy and optimizing [...] Read more.
This research introduces a cutting-edge approach to traffic infrastructure digitization, integrating UAV oblique photography with LiDAR point clouds for high-precision, lightweight 3D road modeling. The proposed method addresses the challenge of accurately capturing the current state of infrastructure while minimizing redundancy and optimizing computational efficiency. A key innovation is the development of the TJYRoad-Net model, which achieves over 85% mIoU segmentation accuracy by including a traffic feature computing (TFC) module composed of three critical components: the Regional Coordinate Encoder (RCE), the Context-Aware Aggregation Unit (CAU), and the Hierarchical Expansion Block. Comparative analysis segments the point clouds into road and non-road categories, achieving centimeter-level registration accuracy with RANSAC and ICP. Two lightweight surface reconstruction techniques are implemented: (1) algorithmic reconstruction, which delivers a 6.3 mm elevation error at 95% confidence in complex intersections, and (2) template matching, which replaces road markings, poles, and vegetation using bounding boxes. These methods ensure accurate results with minimal memory overhead. The optimized 3D models have been successfully applied in driving simulation and traffic flow analysis, providing a practical and scalable solution for real-world infrastructure modeling and analysis. These applications demonstrate the versatility and efficiency of the proposed methods in modern traffic system simulations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue UAVs Revolutionizing Smart City Transportation: Innovations, Challenges, and Potential)
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32 pages, 6284 KiB  
Article
UAV Detection Using Reinforcement Learning
by Arwa AlKhonaini, Tarek Sheltami, Ashraf Mahmoud and Muhammad Imam
Sensors 2024, 24(6), 1870; https://doi.org/10.3390/s24061870 - 14 Mar 2024
Viewed by 1752
Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant popularity in both military and civilian applications due to their cost-effectiveness and flexibility. However, the increased utilization of UAVs raises concerns about the risk of illegal data gathering and potential criminal use. As a result, the [...] Read more.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant popularity in both military and civilian applications due to their cost-effectiveness and flexibility. However, the increased utilization of UAVs raises concerns about the risk of illegal data gathering and potential criminal use. As a result, the accurate detection and identification of intruding UAVs has emerged as a critical research concern. Many algorithms have shown their effectiveness in detecting different objects through different approaches, including radio frequency (RF), computer vision (visual), and sound-based detection. This article proposes a novel approach for detecting and identifying intruding UAVs based on their RF signals by using a hierarchical reinforcement learning technique. We train a UAV agent hierarchically with multiple policies using the REINFORCE algorithm with entropy regularization term to improve the overall accuracy. The research focuses on utilizing extracted features from RF signals to detect intruding UAVs, which contributes to the field of reinforcement learning by investigating a less-explored UAV detection approach. Through extensive evaluation, our findings show the remarkable results of the proposed approach in achieving accurate RF-based detection and identification, with an outstanding detection accuracy of 99.7%. Additionally, our approach demonstrates improved cumulative return performance and reduced loss. The obtained results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed solution in enhancing UAV security and surveillance while advancing the field of UAV detection. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue UAVs Revolutionizing Smart City Transportation: Innovations, Challenges, and Potential)
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