Skip to Content
You are currently on the new version of our website. Access the old version .

Drones, Volume 5, Issue 4

2021 December - 50 articles

Cover Story: NC State University researchers launched a drone from an observation platform on Roan Mountain in North Carolina (1800 meters elevation) to collect imagery of the cliff face. Approximately 1000 meters of elevation change was visible in the photograph, which highlighted the difficulty of monitoring the rare plant, Geum radiatum, at this location. The researchers used a machine learning predictive model to plan a targeted flight area, allowing for efficient data collection without impacting the rare plant or endangering personnel. Visual analysis of UAS imagery verified the locations of thirty-three known plants and discovered four previously undocumented occurrences. View this paper.
  • Issues are regarded as officially published after their release is announced to the table of contents alert mailing list .
  • You may sign up for email alerts to receive table of contents of newly released issues.
  • PDF is the official format for papers published in both, html and pdf forms. To view the papers in pdf format, click on the "PDF Full-text" link, and use the free Adobe Reader to open them.

Articles (50)

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
23 Citations
7,820 Views
12 Pages

Drone Magnetometry in Mining Research. An Application in the Study of Triassic Cu–Co–Ni Mineralizations in the Estancias Mountain Range, Almería (Spain)

  • Daniel Porras,
  • Javier Carrasco,
  • Pedro Carrasco,
  • Santiago Alfageme and ,
  • Diego Gonzalez-Aguilera and
  • Rafael Lopez Guijarro
  • + 1 author+ 0 author

18 December 2021

The use of drones in mining and geological exploration is under rapid development, especially in the field of magnetic field prospection. In part, this is related to the advantages presented for over ground surveys, allowing for high-density data acq...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
40 Citations
8,861 Views
17 Pages

Convolutional Neural Networks for Classification of Drones Using Radars

  • Divy Raval,
  • Emily Hunter,
  • Sinclair Hudson,
  • Anthony Damini and
  • Bhashyam Balaji

15 December 2021

The ability to classify drones using radar signals is a problem of great interest. In this paper, we apply convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) spectrograms of the simulated radar signals reflected from the...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
13 Citations
5,041 Views
16 Pages

Pathways to Unsegregated Sharing of Airspace: Views of the Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Industry

  • Matt Grote,
  • Aliaksei Pilko,
  • James Scanlan,
  • Tom Cherrett and ,
  • Janet Dickinson,
  • Angela Smith,
  • Andy Oakey and
  • Greg Marsden
  • + 3 authors+ 0 author

15 December 2021

The uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV or drone) industry is expanding, offering services such as video/photography, inspection, monitoring, surveying, and logistics. This is leading to competing demands for airspace with existing crewed aircraft activitie...

  • Review
  • Open Access
  • Best Paper Award
154 Citations
24,453 Views
30 Pages

UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge-Computing for IoT Based on AI: A Comprehensive Review

  • Yassine Yazid,
  • Imad Ez-Zazi,
  • Antonio Guerrero-González,
  • Ahmed El Oualkadi and
  • Mounir Arioua

13 December 2021

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming integrated into a wide range of modern IoT applications. The growing number of networked IoT devices generates a large amount of data. However, processing and memorizing this massive volume of data at loca...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Assisted Cooperative Air and Ground Communications)
  • Article
  • Open Access
24 Citations
6,460 Views
16 Pages

12 December 2021

Since the Fourth Industrial Revolution, existing manpower-centric manufacture has been shifting towards technology and data-centric production in all areas of society. The construction sector is also facing a new paradigm called smart construction wi...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of UAS in Construction)
  • Article
  • Open Access
37 Citations
5,559 Views
20 Pages

11 December 2021

A proper classification of 3D point clouds allows fully exploiting data potentiality in assessing and preserving cultural heritage. Point cloud classification workflow is commonly based on the selection and extraction of respective geometric features...

  • Technical Note
  • Open Access
17 Citations
8,515 Views
14 Pages

Design and Implementation of Intelligent EOD System Based on Six-Rotor UAV

  • Jiwei Fan,
  • Ruitao Lu,
  • Xiaogang Yang,
  • Fan Gao and ,
  • Qingge Li and
  • Jun Zeng
  • + 1 author+ 0 author

11 December 2021

Explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) robots can replace humans that work in hazardous environments to ensure worker safety. Thus, they have been widely developed and deployed. However, existing EOD robots have some limitations in environmental adaptatio...

  • Article
  • Open Access
30 Citations
6,714 Views
26 Pages

UAV Path Planning Based on Multi-Stage Constraint Optimization

  • Yong Shen,
  • Yunlou Zhu,
  • Hongwei Kang,
  • Xingping Sun and ,
  • Qingyi Chen and
  • Da Wang
  • + 1 author+ 0 author

6 December 2021

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) path planners have been extensively studied for their effectiveness and high concurrency. However, when there are many obstacles, the path can easily violate constraints during the evo...

  • Article
  • Open Access
7 Citations
5,800 Views
18 Pages

Acceleration-Aware Path Planning with Waypoints

  • Rudolf Ortner,
  • Indrajit Kurmi and
  • Oliver Bimber

27 November 2021

In this article we demonstrate that acceleration and deceleration of direction-turning drones at waypoints have a significant influence to path planning which is important to be considered for time-critical applications, such as drone-supported searc...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
8 Citations
5,877 Views
14 Pages

26 November 2021

Temperature is often used to infer how climate influences wildlife distributions; yet, other parameters also contribute, separately and combined, with effects varying across geographical scales. Here, we used an unoccupied aircraft system to explore...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ecological Applications of Drone-Based Remote Sensing)
  • Article
  • Open Access
60 Citations
10,862 Views
18 Pages

UAV Approach for Detecting Plastic Marine Debris on the Beach: A Case Study in the Po River Delta (Italy)

  • Yuri Taddia,
  • Corinne Corbau,
  • Joana Buoninsegni,
  • Umberto Simeoni and
  • Alberto Pellegrinelli

24 November 2021

Anthropogenic marine debris (AMD) represent a global threat for aquatic environments. It is important to locate and monitor the distribution and presence of macroplastics along beaches to prevent degradation into microplastics (MP), which are potenti...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue UAVs for Coastal Surveying)
  • Article
  • Open Access
18 Citations
10,640 Views
21 Pages

SORA Methodology for Multi-UAS Airframe Inspections in an Airport

  • Carol Martinez,
  • Pedro J. Sanchez-Cuevas,
  • Simos Gerasimou,
  • Abhishek Bera and
  • Miguel A. Olivares-Mendez

24 November 2021

Deploying Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in safety- and business-critical operations requires demonstrating compliance with applicable regulations and a comprehensive understanding of the residual risk associated with the UAS operation. To support t...

  • Communication
  • Open Access
3 Citations
5,446 Views
11 Pages

23 November 2021

Elucidating the various behavioral and ecological uses of animal habitats is the basis for the conservation and management of animal species. Therefore, tracking the movement of animals is necessary. Biotelemetry is used for tracking the movement of...

  • Article
  • Open Access
15 Citations
5,482 Views
17 Pages

Optimum Sizing of Photovoltaic-Battery Power Supply for Drone-Based Cellular Networks

  • Mahshid Javidsharifi,
  • Hamoun Pourroshanfekr Arabani,
  • Tamas Kerekes,
  • Dezso Sera and ,
  • Sergiu Viorel Spataru and
  • Josep M. Guerrero
  • + 1 author+ 0 author

22 November 2021

In order to provide Internet access to rural areas and places without a reliable economic electricity grid, self-sustainable drone-based cellular networks have recently been presented. However, the difficulties of power consumption and mission planni...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
23 Citations
6,007 Views
16 Pages

Using Ground-Based Passive Reflectors for Improving UAV Landing

  • Dmitry Yasentsev,
  • Timofey Shevgunov,
  • Evgeny Efimov and
  • Boris Tatarskiy

19 November 2021

The article reviews the problem of landing on hard-to-reach and poorly developed territories, especially in the case of unmanned aerial vehicles. Various landing systems and approaches are analyzed, and their key advantages and disadvantages are summ...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Conceptual Design, Modeling, and Control Strategies of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
29 Citations
8,585 Views
22 Pages

17 November 2021

This paper considers the self-localization of a tethered drone without using a cable-tension force sensor in GPS-denied environments. The original problem is converted to a state-estimation problem, where the cable-tension force and the three-dimensi...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in SLAM and Data Fusion for UAVs/Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
39 Citations
12,193 Views
42 Pages

Large-Scale Reality Modeling of a University Campus Using Combined UAV and Terrestrial Photogrammetry for Historical Preservation and Practical Use

  • Bryce E. Berrett,
  • Cory A. Vernon,
  • Haley Beckstrand,
  • Madi Pollei and ,
  • Kaleb Markert,
  • Kevin W. Franke and
  • John D. Hedengren
  • + 2 authors+ 0 author

17 November 2021

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) enable detailed historical preservation of large-scale infrastructure and contribute to cultural heritage preservation, improved maintenance, public relations, and development planning. Aerial and terrestrial photo data...

  • Article
  • Open Access
17 Citations
7,223 Views
20 Pages

12 November 2021

In the near future, it’s expected that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will become ubiquitous surrogates for human-crewed vehicles in the field of border patrol, package delivery, etc. Therefore, many three-dimensional (3D) navigation algorithms base...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Conceptual Design, Modeling, and Control Strategies of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
38 Citations
4,974 Views
16 Pages

8 November 2021

In this paper, a fault diagnosis algorithm named improved one-dimensional deep residual shrinkage network with a wide convolutional layer (1D-WIDRSN) is proposed for quadrotor propellers with minor damage, which can effectively identify the fault cla...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Deep Learning for Drones and Its Applications)
  • Article
  • Open Access
10 Citations
6,886 Views
28 Pages

A Practical Validation of Uncooled Thermal Imagers for Small RPAS

  • George Leblanc,
  • Margaret Kalacska,
  • J. Pablo Arroyo-Mora,
  • Oliver Lucanus and
  • Andrew Todd

6 November 2021

Uncooled thermal imaging sensors in the LWIR (7.5 μm to 14 μm) have recently been developed for use with small RPAS. This study derives a new thermal imaging validation methodology via the use of a blackbody source (indoors) and real-world field cond...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
31 Citations
8,861 Views
17 Pages

Designing a User-Centered Interaction Interface for Human–Swarm Teaming

  • Mohammad Divband Soorati,
  • Jediah Clark,
  • Javad Ghofrani,
  • Danesh Tarapore and
  • Sarvapali D. Ramchurn

5 November 2021

A key challenge in human–swarm interaction is to design a usable interface that allows the human operators to monitor and control a scalable swarm. In our study, we restrict the interactions to only one-to-one communications in local neighborhoods be...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
36 Citations
7,859 Views
19 Pages

UAV Patrolling for Wildfire Monitoring by a Dynamic Voronoi Tessellation on Satellite Data

  • Alessandro Giuseppi,
  • Roberto Germanà,
  • Federico Fiorini,
  • Francesco Delli Priscoli and
  • Antonio Pietrabissa

3 November 2021

Fire monitoring and early detection are critical tasks in which Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are commonly employed. This paper presents a system to plan the drone patrolling schedule according to a real-time estimation of a fire propagation index...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue UAVs and Satellite Data for Forest Protection: Remote Sensing, Monitoring, Fire Detection and Emergency Management)
  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
3,933 Views
18 Pages

1 November 2021

The article discusses the UAV lateral motion stabilization system, as a MIMO multiloop multirate continuous-discrete system, specified in the form of an input–output model in the domain of discrete Laplace transform or in the form of a structural dia...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Conceptual Design, Modeling, and Control Strategies of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
59 Citations
11,616 Views
10 Pages

Energy-Efficient Inference on the Edge Exploiting TinyML Capabilities for UAVs

  • Wamiq Raza,
  • Anas Osman,
  • Francesco Ferrini and
  • Francesco De Natale

29 October 2021

In recent years, the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased dramatically. UAVs can accomplish complex or dangerous tasks in a reliable and cost-effective way but are still limited by power consumption problems, which pose seri...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Civil Applications of Unmanned Aircraft Systems)
  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
26 Citations
6,843 Views
13 Pages

Machine Learning-Assisted Adaptive Modulation for Optimized Drone-User Communication in B5G

  • Sudheesh Puthenveettil Gopi,
  • Maurizio Magarini,
  • Saeed Hamood Alsamhi and
  • Alexey V. Shvetsov

29 October 2021

The fundamental issue for Beyond fifth Generation (B5G) is providing a pervasive connection to heterogeneous and various devices in smart environments. Therefore, Drones play a vital role in the B5G, allowing for wireless broadcast and high-speed com...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Assisted Cooperative Air and Ground Communications)
  • Article
  • Open Access
11 Citations
5,932 Views
15 Pages

28 October 2021

A census of endangered plant populations is critical to determining their size, spatial distribution, and geographical extent. Traditional, on-the-ground methods for collecting census data are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. Use of dr...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ecological Applications of Drone-Based Remote Sensing)
  • Article
  • Open Access
32 Citations
10,106 Views
17 Pages

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Operational Monitoring of Landfills

  • Timofey Filkin,
  • Natalia Sliusar,
  • Marco Ritzkowski and
  • Marion Huber-Humer

26 October 2021

This study justifies the prospect of using aerial imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for technological monitoring and operational control of municipal solid waste landfills. It presents the results of surveys (aerial imagery) of a number of...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Civil Applications of Unmanned Aircraft Systems)
  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
24 Citations
5,785 Views
35 Pages

25 October 2021

This paper proposes novel distributed control methods to address coverage and flocking problems in three-dimensional (3D) environments using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Two classes of coverage problems are considered in this work, namel...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Conceptual Design, Modeling, and Control Strategies of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
8 Citations
5,682 Views
19 Pages

Prototype Development of Cross-Shaped Microphone Array System for Drone Localization Based on Delay-and-Sum Beamforming in GNSS-Denied Areas

  • Hirokazu Madokoro,
  • Satoshi Yamamoto,
  • Kanji Watanabe,
  • Masayuki Nishiguchi and ,
  • Stephanie Nix,
  • Hanwool Woo and
  • Kazuhito Sato
  • + 2 authors+ 0 author

23 October 2021

Drones equipped with a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver for absolute localization provide high-precision autonomous flight and hovering. However, the GNSS signal reception sensitivity is considerably lower in areas such as those bet...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in SLAM and Data Fusion for UAVs/Drones)
  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
12 Citations
4,934 Views
22 Pages

Nonlinear Analysis and Bifurcation Characteristics of Whirl Flutter in Unmanned Aerial Systems

  • Anthony Quintana,
  • Rui Vasconcellos,
  • Glen Throneberry and
  • Abdessattar Abdelkefi

21 October 2021

Aerial drones have improved significantly over the recent decades with stronger and smaller motors, more powerful propellers, and overall optimization of systems. These improvements have consequently increased top speeds and improved a variety of per...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Conceptual Design, Modeling, and Control Strategies of Drones)
  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
29 Citations
8,335 Views
15 Pages

Thermal Sensor Calibration for Unmanned Aerial Systems Using an External Heated Shutter

  • Jacob Virtue,
  • Darren Turner,
  • Guy Williams,
  • Stephanie Zeliadt and ,
  • Matthew McCabe and
  • Arko Lucieer
  • + 1 author+ 0 author

17 October 2021

Uncooled thermal infrared sensors are increasingly being deployed on unmanned aerial systems (UAS) for agriculture, forestry, wildlife surveys, and surveillance. The acquisition of thermal data requires accurate and uniform testing of equipment to en...

  • Article
  • Open Access
10 Citations
3,940 Views
16 Pages

Coverage Strategy for Target Location in Marine Environments Using Fixed-Wing UAVs

  • Javier Muñoz,
  • Blanca López,
  • Fernando Quevedo,
  • Concepción A. Monje and ,
  • Santiago Garrido and
  • Luis E. Moreno
  • + 1 author+ 0 author

17 October 2021

In this paper, we propose a coverage method for the search of lost targets or debris on the ocean surface. The OSCAR data set is used to determine the marine currents and the differential evolution genetic filter is used to optimize the sweep directi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
9 Citations
4,066 Views
14 Pages

17 October 2021

Localization and mapping technologies are of great importance for all varieties of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform their operations. In the near future, it is planned to increase the use of micro/nano-size UAVs. Such vehicles are sometimes...

  • Feature Paper
  • Review
  • Open Access
46 Citations
17,488 Views
42 Pages

Advanced Leak Detection and Quantification of Methane Emissions Using sUAS

  • Derek Hollenbeck,
  • Demitrius Zulevic and
  • Yangquan Chen

14 October 2021

Detecting and quantifying methane emissions is gaining an increasingly vital role in mitigating emissions for the oil and gas industry through early detection and repair and will aide our understanding of how emissions in natural ecosystems are playi...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers of Drones)
  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
19 Citations
6,165 Views
15 Pages

Early Estimation of Olive Production from Light Drone Orthophoto, through Canopy Radius

  • Luciano Ortenzi,
  • Simona Violino,
  • Federico Pallottino,
  • Simone Figorilli and ,
  • Simone Vasta,
  • Francesco Tocci,
  • Francesca Antonucci,
  • Giancarlo Imperi and
  • Corrado Costa
  • + 4 authors+ 0 author

14 October 2021

Background: The present work aims at obtaining an approximate early production estimate of olive orchards used for extra virgin olive oil production by combining image analysis techniques with light drone images acquisition and photogrammetric recons...

(This article belongs to the Section Drones in Agriculture and Forestry)
  • Article
  • Open Access
7 Citations
3,263 Views
25 Pages

A Density-Based and Lane-Free Microscopic Traffic Flow Model Applied to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

  • Mirmojtaba Gharibi,
  • Zahra Gharibi,
  • Raouf Boutaba and
  • Steven L. Waslander

12 October 2021

In this work, we introduce a microscopic traffic flow model called Scalar Capacity Model (SCM) which can be used to study the formation of traffic on an airway link for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as well as for the ground vehicles on...

  • Article
  • Open Access
15 Citations
4,777 Views
17 Pages

11 October 2021

UAV-based photogrammetry has many applications today. Measuring of snow depth using Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques is one of them. Determining the depth of snow is very important for a wide range of scientific research activities. In the alpi...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Civil Applications of Unmanned Aircraft Systems)
  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
46 Citations
8,957 Views
23 Pages

11 October 2021

LiDAR technology has been proven to be an effective remote sensing technique for forest inventory and management. Among existing remote sensing platforms, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are rapidly gaining popularity for their capability to provide h...

(This article belongs to the Section Drones in Agriculture and Forestry)
  • Article
  • Open Access
38 Citations
11,019 Views
19 Pages

8 October 2021

With the development of underwater technology, it is important to develop a wide range of autonomous and remotely operated underwater vehicles for various tasks. Depending on the problem that needs to be solved, vehicles will have different designs a...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Conceptual Design, Modeling, and Control Strategies of Drones)
  • Concept Paper
  • Open Access
33 Citations
11,809 Views
12 Pages

6 October 2021

Drones are increasingly becoming a ubiquitous feature of society. They are being used for a multiplicity of applications for military, leisure, economic, and academic purposes. Their application in academia, especially as social science research tool...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
10 Citations
3,862 Views
11 Pages

4 October 2021

In recent years, small-scale drones have been used in heterogeneous tasks, such as border control, precision agriculture, and search and rescue. This is mainly due to their small size that allows for easy deployment, their low cost, and their increas...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Deep Learning for Drones and Its Applications)
  • Article
  • Open Access
41 Citations
14,867 Views
23 Pages

A Visual Aquaculture System Using a Cloud-Based Autonomous Drones

  • Naomi A. Ubina,
  • Shyi-Chyi Cheng,
  • Hung-Yuan Chen,
  • Chin-Chun Chang and
  • Hsun-Yu Lan

2 October 2021

This paper presents a low-cost and cloud-based autonomous drone system to survey and monitor aquaculture sites. We incorporated artificial intelligence (AI) services using computer vision and combined various deep learning recognition models to achie...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Civil Applications of Unmanned Aircraft Systems)
  • Article
  • Open Access
42 Citations
12,162 Views
20 Pages

Efficient Drone-Based Rare Plant Monitoring Using a Species Distribution Model and AI-Based Object Detection

  • William Reckling,
  • Helena Mitasova,
  • Karl Wegmann,
  • Gary Kauffman and
  • Rebekah Reid

2 October 2021

Monitoring rare plant species is used to confirm presence, assess health, and verify population trends. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are ideal tools for monitoring rare plants because they can efficiently collect data without impacting the plant or...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ecological Applications of Drone-Based Remote Sensing)
  • Article
  • Open Access
16 Citations
12,330 Views
14 Pages

1 October 2021

The use of multirotor drones has increased dramatically in the last decade. These days, quadcopters and Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) drones can be found in many applications such as search and rescue, inspection, commercial photography, intell...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Conceptual Design, Modeling, and Control Strategies of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
8 Citations
3,228 Views
16 Pages

30 September 2021

Autonomous navigation of micro aerial vehicles in unknown environments not only requires exploring their time-varying surroundings, but also ensuring the complete safety of flights at all times. The current research addresses estimation of the potent...

(This article belongs to the Topic Autonomy for Enabling the Next Generation of UAVs)
  • Feature Paper
  • Review
  • Open Access
192 Citations
28,905 Views
29 Pages

Drone-Based Non-Destructive Inspection of Industrial Sites: A Review and Case Studies

  • Parham Nooralishahi,
  • Clemente Ibarra-Castanedo,
  • Shakeb Deane,
  • Fernando López and ,
  • Shashank Pant,
  • Marc Genest,
  • Nicolas P. Avdelidis and
  • Xavier P. V. Maldague
  • + 3 authors+ 0 author

29 September 2021

Using aerial platforms for Non-Destructive Inspection (NDI) of large and complex structures is a growing field of interest in various industries. Infrastructures such as: buildings, bridges, oil and gas, etc. refineries require regular and extensive...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Civil Applications of Unmanned Aircraft Systems)
  • Article
  • Open Access
8 Citations
4,837 Views
15 Pages

26 September 2021

The overall safety of a building can be effectively evaluated through regular inspection of the indoor walls by unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). However, when the UGV performs line patrol inspections according to the specified path, it is easy to be...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Conceptual Design, Modeling, and Control Strategies of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
14 Citations
10,227 Views
33 Pages

Precision Landing for Low-Maintenance Remote Operations with UAVs

  • Miguel Moreira,
  • Fábio Azevedo,
  • André Ferreira,
  • Dário Pedro and ,
  • João Matos-Carvalho,
  • Álvaro Ramos,
  • Rui Loureiro and
  • Luís Campos
  • + 3 authors+ 0 author

24 September 2021

This work proposes a fully integrated ecosystem composed of three main components with a complex goal: to implement an autonomous system with a UAV requiring little to no maintenance and capable of flying autonomously. For this goal, was developed an...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Conceptual Design, Modeling, and Control Strategies of Drones)
  • Article
  • Open Access
40 Citations
8,395 Views
16 Pages

24 September 2021

With the development of photogrammetry technologies, point clouds have found a wide range of use in academic and commercial areas. This situation has made it essential to extract information from point clouds. In particular, artificial intelligence a...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue UAV Photogrammetry for 3D Modeling)
  • Article
  • Open Access
15 Citations
4,843 Views
11 Pages

Surveys of Large Waterfowl and Their Habitats Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: A Case Study on the Siberian Crane

  • Ding Wen,
  • Lei Su,
  • Yuanman Hu,
  • Zaiping Xiong and ,
  • Miao Liu and
  • Yingxian Long
  • + 1 author+ 0 author

23 September 2021

Waterfowl surveys, especially for endangered waterfowl living in wetlands, are essential to protect endangered waterfowl and to create a management scenario of their habitats. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are powerful new tools for waterfowl surve...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Drones for Biodiversity Conservation)
XFacebookLinkedIn
Drones - ISSN 2504-446X