2022 September - 44 articles
A micro air vehicle (MAV) is physically lightweight, such that even a slight perturbation could affect its attitude and position tracking. To attain better autonomous flight system performance, MAVs require good control strategies to maintain their a...
Not any radar dwell time of a drone radar is suitable for detecting micro-Doppler (or jet engine modulation, JEM) produced by the rotating blades in radar signals of drones. Theoretically, any X-band drone radar system should detect micro-Doppler of...
Even as human–robot interactions become increasingly common, conventional small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS), typically multicopters, can still be unsafe for deployment in an indoor environment in close proximity to humans without significa...
This work designed a disturbance-observer-based nonlinear sliding mode surface controller (SMC) and validated the controller using a simulated PX4-conducted quadcopter. To achieve this goal, this research (1) developed a dynamic mathematical model; (...
Many public safety agencies in the US have initiated a UAS-based procedure to document and map crash scenes. In addition to significantly reducing the time taken to document evidence as well as ensuring first responder safety, UAS-based mapping reduc...
This paper presents a robust control strategy for controlling the flight of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a passively (fixed) tilted hexarotor. The proposed controller is based on a robust extended-state observer to estimate and reject intern...
Soil salinization is one of the most important causes of land degradation and desertification, often threatening land management and sustainable agricultural development. Due to the low resolution of satellites, fine mapping of soil salinity cannot b...
Modern plantation forest procedures still rely heavily on manual data acquisition in the inventory process, limiting the quantity and quality of the collected data. This limitation in collection performance is often due to the difficulty of traversin...
Estimating seabird and pinniped abundance is central to wildlife management and ecosystem monitoring in Antarctica. Unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) can collect images to support monitoring, but manual image analysis is often impractical. Automating t...
Cotton constitutes 81% of the world’s natural fibers. Accurate and rapid cotton yield estimation is important for cotton trade and agricultural policy development. Therefore, we developed a remote sensing index that can intuitively represent co...
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are a popular platform for air quality measurements. For vertical measurements, rotary-wing UAVs are particularly well-suited. However, an important concern with rotary-wing UAVs is how the rotor-downwash affects measu...
In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been increasingly used in power line inspections. Birds often nest on transmission line towers, which threatens safe power line operation. The existing research on bird’s nest inspection usin...
Due to the differences between simulations and the real world, the application of reinforcement learning (RL) in drone control encounters problems such as oscillations and instability. This study proposes a control strategy for quadrotor drones using...
The technologies of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have seen extremely rapid development in recent years. UAV technologies are being developed much faster than the means of their legislation. There have been many means of UAV detection and neutraliz...
Supply chain solutions are based on first-mile and last-mile deliveries; their efficiency significantly influences the total cost of operation. Drone technologies make it possible to improve first-mile and last-mile operations, but the design and opt...
This research focuses on the development of two bioinspired micro air vehicle (MAV) prototypes, based on morphing wings and wing grid wingtip devices. The morphing wings MAV tries to adapt the aerodynamics of the vehicle to each phase of flight by mo...
Over the last few years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), also called drones, have attracted considerable interest in the academic field and exploration in the research field of wireless sensor networks (WSN). Furthermore, the application of drones ai...
Since it is difficult to accurately track reference trajectories under the condition of stride constraints for an unmanned hexapod robot moving with rhythmic gait, an omnidirectional tracking strategy based on model predictive control and real-time r...
The data analysis subsystem of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) includes two main modules: a data acquisition module for data processing and a normalization module. One of the main features of an adaptive UAV protection system is the analysis of its...
To solve the problem of location services in harsh environments, we propose an integrated navigation algorithm based on broadband low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite communication and navigation integration with 3-satellite alternate switch ranging. Firs...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have drawn significant attention from researchers over the last decade due to their wide range of possible uses. Carrying massive payloads concurrent with light UAVs has broadened the aeronautics context, which is feas...
Magnetic surveys have been widely used in archaeological field investigations. However, conventional survey methods are often restricted by complicated field conditions and ambiguities in data interpretation. In this study, a novel magnetic survey sy...
In recent years, the performance of free-and-open-source software (FOSS) for image processing has significantly increased. This trend, as well as technological advancements in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) industry, have opened blue skies for bot...
Understory vegetation cover is an important indicator of forest health, and it can also be used as a proxy in the exploration of soil erosion dynamics. Therefore, quantifying the understory vegetation cover in hilly areas in southern China is crucial...
Grasshoppers are integral parts of rangeland ecosystems but also have the potential to reach population densities high enough (outbreaks) to cause serious economic damage from forage loss and affect adjacent crops. The objective of this study was to...
Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) landing remains a challenge in uncertain environments, e.g., landing on a mobile ground platform such as an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) without knowing its motion dynamics. A traditional PID (Proportional, I...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a powerful technology for introducing untraditional solutions to many challenges in non-military fields and industrial applications in the next few years. However, the limitations of a drone’s bat...
A trans-medium aircraft is a new concept aircraft that can both dive in the water and fly in the air. In this paper, a new type of water–air multi-medium span vehicle is designed based on the water entry and exit structure model of a multi-rotor UAV....
As an important and basic platform for remote life sensing, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) may hide the vital signals of an injured human due to their own motion. In this work, a novel method to remove the platform motion and accurately extract huma...
Unmanned air vehicle communication (UAV) systems have recently emerged as a quick, low-cost, and adaptable solution to numerous challenges in the next-generation wireless network. In particular, UAV systems have shown to be very useful in wireless co...
In this paper, a new adaptive observer is proposed to estimate the actuator fault and disturbance of a quadrotor UAV system with actuator failure and disturbance. Based on this, a nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode controller is designed. Firstly...
Pasture management approaches can determine the productivity, sustainability, and ecological balance of livestock production. Sensing techniques potentially provide methods to assess the performance of different grazing practices that are more labor...
We present Inverse Airborne Optical Sectioning (IAOS), an optical analogy to Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR). Moving targets, such as walking people, that are heavily occluded by vegetation can be made visible and tracked with a stationary op...
Sugarcane white leaf phytoplasma (white leaf disease) in sugarcane crops is caused by a phytoplasma transmitted by leafhopper vectors. White leaf disease (WLD) occurs predominantly in some Asian countries and is a devastating global threat to sugarca...
This paper presents a generic robust controller that allows applications in various quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems effectively even when facing severe system uncertainties and unknown external disturbances. The fractional-order linea...
Due to the rapid development of deep learning, the performance of object detection has greatly improved. However, object detection in high-resolution Unmanned Aerial Vehicles images remains a challenging problem for three main reasons: (1) the object...
Most of the recent research on distributed formation control of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms is founded on position, distance, and displacement-based approaches; however, a very promising approach, i.e., bearing-based formation control, is st...
This paper develops a distributed method, namely, distributed allocation with time windows (DATW) for managing the multi-UAV task assignment problem (MTAP) with complex time window constraints. By aiming directly to minimize the average task completi...
This study aims to identify the factors associated with the adoption of drone delivery in Medellín, Colombia, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. For that purpose, it implemented the Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory and the Technology...
Drone detection radar systems have been verified for supporting unmanned air traffic management (UTM). Here, we propose the concept of classify while scan (CWS) technology to improve the detection performance of drone detection radar systems and then...
Currently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used due to their low cost and flexibility. In particular, they are used in remote sensing as airborne platforms for various instruments. Here, we investigate the capability of a conical scanning...
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, provided with camera sensors enable improved situational awareness of several emergency responses and disaster management applications, as they can function from remote and complex accessing regions. The UA...
This article proposes an adaptive controller for a quadrotor UAV for carrying unknown payloads while tracking any trajectory. The proposed adaptive controller is robust to modeling uncertainties and does not require any a priori knowledge of the boun...
To integrate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the national airspace in a safe manner, a risk-based approach to the regulation of UAVs is adopted in many countries. Thus, the capacity to permit UAVs in urban airspace also needs to be evaluated in...
