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Drones, Volume 2, Issue 2

June 2018 - 10 articles

Cover Story: Chimpanzees are one of our closest cousins, and are at risk of extinction. Accurate surveys are crucial to allocating conservation efforts to where they are most needed. However, the extent and topography of the area in need of monitoring represent logistical challenges. Here we explored drone applications as a cost- and time-efficient alternative to ground surveys. We evaluated drone performance for chimpanzee nest detection and assessed the factors that influence detectability. An average of 10% of the nests spotted from the ground were detected from the air, with improved nest detection in imagery with higher spatial resolution. We argue that while this approach still requires complimentary validation from ground surveys, the rapid pace of technological improvement suggests drones as a promising application in the near future. View this paper.
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Articles (10)

  • Article
  • Open Access
10 Citations
8,025 Views
20 Pages

5 June 2018

This paper presents the modeling, control design, and efficiency analysis of a micro-quadrotor aerial vehicle with airfoils. We derive the equations of motion for a micro-quadrotor (length 0.15 m and mass 0.03 kg) outfitted with two symmetric airfoil...

  • Article
  • Open Access
11 Citations
6,851 Views
15 Pages

28 May 2018

Physical Habitat Assessments (PHA) are useful to characterize and monitor stream and river habitat conditions, but can be costly and time-consuming. Alternative methods for data collection are getting attention, such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
6,984 Views
14 Pages

Development and Testing of a Low-Cost Instrumentation Platform for Fixed-Wing UAV Performance Analysis

  • Tulio Dapper e Silva,
  • Vinicius Cabreira and
  • Edison Pignaton De Freitas

21 May 2018

The flight data of a fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can be evaluated by its designers in order to analyze its performance, to validate the project criteria and to make new decisions based on the data analyses. In this paper, the authors pro...

  • Article
  • Open Access
23 Citations
10,579 Views
16 Pages

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) Photogrammetry in the Conservation of Historic Places: Carleton Immersive Media Studio Case Studies

  • Alex Federman,
  • Sujan Shrestha,
  • Mario Santana Quintero,
  • Davide Mezzino,
  • John Gregg,
  • Shawn Kretz and
  • Christian Ouimet

18 May 2018

The increasing commercialization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has opened the possibility of performing low-cost aerial image acquisition for the documentation of cultural heritage sites through UAV photogrammetry. This paper presents two case s...

  • Article
  • Open Access
50 Citations
12,187 Views
17 Pages

Assessment of Chimpanzee Nest Detectability in Drone-Acquired Images

  • Noémie Bonnin,
  • Alexander C. Van Andel,
  • Jeffrey T. Kerby,
  • Alex K. Piel,
  • Lilian Pintea and
  • Serge A. Wich

23 April 2018

As with other species of great apes, chimpanzee numbers have declined over the past decades. Proper conservation of the remaining chimpanzees requires accurate and frequent data on their distribution and density. In Tanzania, 75% of the chimpanzees l...

  • Article
  • Open Access
44 Citations
11,929 Views
14 Pages

Use of UAV-Borne Spectrometer for Land Cover Classification

  • Sowmya Natesan,
  • Costas Armenakis,
  • Guy Benari and
  • Regina Lee

20 April 2018

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are being used for low altitude remote sensing for thematic land classification using visible light and multi-spectral sensors. The objective of this work was to investigate the use of UAV equipped with a compact spectr...

  • Article
  • Open Access
52 Citations
11,619 Views
18 Pages

Vision-Based Autonomous Landing of a Quadrotor on the Perturbed Deck of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle

  • Riccardo Polvara,
  • Sanjay Sharma,
  • Jian Wan,
  • Andrew Manning and
  • Robert Sutton

14 April 2018

Autonomous landing on the deck of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is still a major challenge for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this paper, a fiducial marker is located on the platform so as to facilitate the task since it is possible to retri...

  • Article
  • Open Access
19 Citations
8,409 Views
11 Pages

A Novel Approach for Brushless DC Motors Characterization in Drones Based on Chaos

  • Ramon L. V. Medeiros,
  • Jorge Gabriel G. S. Ramos,
  • Tiago P. Nascimento,
  • Abel C. Lima Filho and
  • Alisson V. Brito

10 April 2018

A novel technique named Signal Analysis based on Chaos using Density of Maxima (SAC-DM) is presented to analyze Brushless Direct Current (BLDC) motors behavior. These motors are vastly used in electric vehicles, especially in Drones. The proposed app...

  • Article
  • Open Access
35 Citations
11,576 Views
17 Pages

9 April 2018

Due to safety concerns of integrating small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into non-segregated airspace, aviation authorities have required a set of detect and avoid (DAA) systems to be equipped on small UAS for beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) f...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
12 Citations
6,986 Views
14 Pages

Debitage and Drones: Classifying and Characterising Neolithic Stone Tool Production in the Shetland Islands Using High Resolution Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery

  • William Megarry,
  • Conor Graham,
  • Bernard Gilhooly,
  • Brendan O’Neill,
  • Rob Sands,
  • Astrid Nyland and
  • Gabriel Cooney

22 March 2018

The application of high-resolution imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to classify the spatial extent and morphological character of ground and polished stone tool production at quarry sites in the Shetland Islands is explored in this paper....

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Drones - ISSN 2504-446X