Skip to Content

Drones, Volume 7, Issue 10

2023 October - 50 articles

Cover Story: Electrification needs and reliability constraints drive the design of long-endurance UAV propulsion systems toward the use of dual-redundant motors. Due to imperfections or degradations, torque splits can deviate from nominal splits, causing force-fighting and reduced efficiency. The proposed technique, applicable for both signal-based and model-based monitoring schemes, allows us to evaluate the torque in a dual-stator system by only elaborating speed and direct/quadrature currents during motor acceleration, through the estimation of demagnetization and electrical angle misalignment. The monitoring is firstly designed by means of a system model, experimentally validated using a motor prototype with degradations, and then verified simulating the system dynamics during UAV flight manoeuvres. 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)

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
2,958 Views
15 Pages

23 October 2023

The temporal monitoring of indicator plant species in high nature value grassland is crucial for nature conservation. However, traditional monitoring approaches are resource-intensive, straining limited funds and personnel. In this study, we demonstr...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
3,343 Views
20 Pages

Investigating and Analyzing the Potential for Regenerating Excess Energy in a Helicopter UAV

  • Chindanai Kodchaniphaphong,
  • Jay-tawee Pukrushpan and
  • Chaiwat Klumpol

22 October 2023

Energy consumption is a critical parameter in the development of helicopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Today, helicopter UAVs are playing an increasingly pivotal role in various applications, from surveillance and reconnaissance to package deli...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
4,210 Views
17 Pages

20 October 2023

Small fixed-wing electric Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are perfect candidates to perform tasks in wide areas, such as photogrammetry, surveillance, monitoring, or search and rescue, among others. They are easy to transport and assemble, have much...

  • Article
  • Open Access
6 Citations
3,551 Views
20 Pages

19 October 2023

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are able to act as movable aerial base stations to enhance wireless coverage for edge users with poor ground communication quality. However, in urban environments, the link between UAVs and ground users can be blocked...

  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
3,154 Views
22 Pages

18 October 2023

Under the framework of sixth-generation (6G) wireless communications, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) plays an irreplaceable role in a number of communication systems. In this paper, a novel cluster-based low-altitude UAV-to-vehicle (U2V) non-stati...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
3,068 Views
18 Pages

Multi-Constrained Geometric Guidance Law with a Data-Driven Method

  • Xinghui Yan,
  • Yuzhong Tang,
  • Yulei Xu,
  • Heng Shi and
  • Jihong Zhu

18 October 2023

A data-driven geometric guidance method is proposed for the multi-constrained guidance problem of variable-velocity unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Firstly, a two-phase flight trajectory based on a log-aesthetic space curve (LASC) is designed. The i...

  • Article
  • Open Access
7 Citations
4,668 Views
23 Pages

Typical Fault Detection on Drone Images of Transmission Lines Based on Lightweight Structure and Feature-Balanced Network

  • Gujing Han,
  • Ruijie Wang,
  • Qiwei Yuan,
  • Liu Zhao,
  • Saidian Li,
  • Ming Zhang,
  • Min He and
  • Liang Qin

17 October 2023

In the context of difficulty in detection problems and the limited computing resources of various fault scales in aerial images of transmission line UAV inspections, this paper proposes a TD-YOLO algorithm (YOLO for transmission detection). Firstly,...

  • Review
  • Open Access
96 Citations
15,208 Views
42 Pages

16 October 2023

This paper reviews the diverse applications of drone technologies in the built environment and their role in climate change research. Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have emerged as valuable tools for environmental scientists, offering ne...

  • Article
  • Open Access
20 Citations
4,062 Views
22 Pages

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle 3D Path Planning Based on an Improved Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm

  • Tao Zhang,
  • Liya Yu,
  • Shaobo Li,
  • Fengbin Wu,
  • Qisong Song and
  • Xingxing Zhang

16 October 2023

A well-organized path can assist unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in performing tasks efficiently. The artificial fish swarm algorithm (AFSA) is a widely used intelligent optimization algorithm. However, the traditional AFSA exhibits issues of non-uni...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
6 Citations
3,545 Views
21 Pages

Bubble Plume Tracking Using a Backseat Driver on an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

  • Jimin Hwang,
  • Neil Bose,
  • Gina Millar,
  • Craig Bulger and
  • Ginelle Nazareth

16 October 2023

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been applied in various scientific missions including oceanographic research, bathymetry studies, sea mine detection, and marine pollution tracking. We have designed and field-tested in the ocean a backseat...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
2,758 Views
25 Pages

13 October 2023

In this paper, we delve into the domain of heterogeneous drone-enabled aerial base stations, each equipped with varying transmit powers, serving as downlink wireless providers for ground users. A central challenge lies in strategically selecting and...

  • Article
  • Open Access
16 Citations
3,040 Views
25 Pages

13 October 2023

Given the accelerated advancement of drones in an array of application domains, the imperative of effective path planning has emerged as a quintessential research focus. Particularly in intricate three-dimensional (3D) environments, formulating the o...

  • Article
  • Open Access
8 Citations
3,999 Views
17 Pages

Study on the Design and Experiment of Trichogramma Ball Delivery System Based on Agricultural Drone

  • Cancan Song,
  • Qingyu Wang,
  • Guobin Wang,
  • Lilian Liu,
  • Tongsheng Zhang,
  • Jingang Han and
  • Yubin Lan

11 October 2023

Trichogramma-based biological control technology is of great significance to the development of green agriculture. Agricultural drones have the advantages of low-altitude and high-speed operations and have been well applied and widely recognized in t...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
2,702 Views
14 Pages

10 October 2023

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely utilized for their various advantages. However, UAVs exhibit high mobility and energy storage restrictions in some applications, which can compromise the quality and reliability of communication links....

  • Article
  • Open Access
5 Citations
5,458 Views
16 Pages

Development of a Real-Time Vespa velutina Nest Detection and Notification System Using Artificial Intelligence in Drones

  • Yuseok Jeong,
  • Moon-Seok Jeon,
  • Jaesu Lee,
  • Seung-Hwa Yu,
  • Su-bae Kim,
  • Dongwon Kim,
  • Kyoung-Chul Kim,
  • Siyoung Lee,
  • Chang-Woo Lee and
  • Inchan Choi

10 October 2023

Vespa velutina is an ecosystem disruptor that causes annual damage worth KRW 170 billion (USD 137 million) to the South Korean beekeeping industry. Due to its strong fertility and high-lying habitat, it is difficult to control. This study aimed to de...

  • Review
  • Open Access
16 Citations
5,100 Views
18 Pages

The Use of UAVs for Morphological Coastal Change Monitoring—A Bibliometric Analysis

  • Jorge Novais,
  • António Vieira,
  • António Bento-Gonçalves,
  • Sara Silva,
  • Saulo Folharini and
  • Tiago Marques

9 October 2023

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in many fields of expertise has increased over recent years. As such, UAVs used for monitoring coastline changes are also becoming more frequent, more practical, and more effective, whether for conducting ac...

  • Communication
  • Open Access
11 Citations
3,556 Views
12 Pages

UAV-Aided Wireless Energy Transfer for Sustaining Internet of Everything in 6G

  • Yueling Che,
  • Zeyu Zhao,
  • Sheng Luo,
  • Kaishun Wu,
  • Lingjie Duan and
  • Victor C. M. Leung

9 October 2023

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a promising technology used to provide on-demand wireless energy transfer (WET) and sustain various low-power ground devices (GDs) for the Internet of Everything (IoE) in sixth generation (6G) wireless networks. Ho...

  • Article
  • Open Access
7 Citations
3,970 Views
24 Pages

A Hierarchical Blockchain-Based Trust Measurement Method for Drone Cluster Nodes

  • Jinxin Zuo,
  • Ruohan Cao,
  • Jiahao Qi,
  • Peng Gao,
  • Ziping Wang,
  • Jin Li,
  • Long Zhang and
  • Yueming Lu

8 October 2023

In response to the challenge of low accuracy in node trust evaluation due to the high dynamics of entry and exit of drone cluster nodes, we propose a hierarchical blockchain-based trust measurement method for drone cluster nodes. This method overcome...

  • Article
  • Open Access
11 Citations
2,852 Views
26 Pages

8 October 2023

In response to the issue of UAV escape guidance, this study proposed a unified intelligent control strategy synthesizing optimal guidance and meta deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Optimal control with minor energy consumption was introduced to meet...

  • Article
  • Open Access
8 Citations
4,582 Views
17 Pages

7 October 2023

This article describes the process of integrating one of the most commonly used laser methane detectors, the Laser Methane mini (LMm), and a multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based on the Pixhawk flight controller to create an unmanned aerial...

  • Article
  • Open Access
42 Citations
12,049 Views
18 Pages

Deep Learning-Based Weed Detection Using UAV Images: A Comparative Study

  • Tej Bahadur Shahi,
  • Sweekar Dahal,
  • Chiranjibi Sitaula,
  • Arjun Neupane and
  • William Guo

7 October 2023

Semantic segmentation has been widely used in precision agriculture, such as weed detection, which is pivotal to increasing crop yields. Various well-established and swiftly evolved AI models have been developed of late for semantic segmentation in w...

  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
3,901 Views
14 Pages

Towards Real-Time On-Drone Pedestrian Tracking in 4K Inputs

  • Chanyoung Oh,
  • Moonsoo Lee and
  • Chaedeok Lim

6 October 2023

Over the past several years, significant progress has been made in object tracking, but challenges persist in tracking objects in high-resolution images captured from drones. Such images usually contain very tiny objects, and the movement of the dron...

  • Article
  • Open Access
12 Citations
4,350 Views
23 Pages

Dynamic Offloading in Flying Fog Computing: Optimizing IoT Network Performance with Mobile Drones

  • Wei Min,
  • Abdukodir Khakimov,
  • Abdelhamied A. Ateya,
  • Mohammed ElAffendi,
  • Ammar Muthanna,
  • Ahmed A. Abd El-Latif and
  • Mohammed Saleh Ali Muthanna

5 October 2023

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the increasing need for low-latency and high-throughput applications have led to the introduction of distributed edge computing. Flying fog computing is a promising solution that can be used to...

  • Review
  • Open Access
75 Citations
18,334 Views
29 Pages

Real-Time Object Detection Based on UAV Remote Sensing: A Systematic Literature Review

  • Zhen Cao,
  • Lammert Kooistra,
  • Wensheng Wang,
  • Leifeng Guo and
  • João Valente

3 October 2023

Real-time object detection based on UAV remote sensing is widely required in different scenarios. In the past 20 years, with the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), remote sensing technology, deep learning technology, and edge computing te...

  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
2,519 Views
30 Pages

3 October 2023

This paper provides an analytical framework to address the definition of sensing requirements in non-cooperative UAS sense and avoid. The generality of the approach makes it useful for the exploration of sensor design and selection trade-offs, for th...

  • Article
  • Open Access
7 Citations
2,871 Views
17 Pages

Intelligent Resource Allocation Using an Artificial Ecosystem Optimizer with Deep Learning on UAV Networks

  • Ahsan Rafiq,
  • Reem Alkanhel,
  • Mohammed Saleh Ali Muthanna,
  • Evgeny Mokrov,
  • Ahmed Aziz and
  • Ammar Muthanna

3 October 2023

An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based cellular network over a millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band addresses the necessities of flexible coverage and high data rate in the next-generation network. But, the use of a wide range of antennas and high...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
3,524 Views
18 Pages

3 October 2023

This paper deals with the development of a model-based technique to monitor the condition of torque imbalances in a dual-stator permanent magnet synchronous motor for UAV full-electric propulsion. Due to imperfections, degradations or uncertainties,...

  • Article
  • Open Access
10 Citations
3,730 Views
18 Pages

Quantifying Within-Flight Variation in Land Surface Temperature from a UAV-Based Thermal Infrared Camera

  • Jamal Elfarkh,
  • Kasper Johansen,
  • Victor Angulo,
  • Omar Lopez Camargo and
  • Matthew F. McCabe

2 October 2023

Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key variable used across various applications, including irrigation monitoring, vegetation health assessment and urban heat island studies. While satellites offer moderate-resolution LST data, unmanned aerial vehic...

  • Article
  • Open Access
35 Citations
8,284 Views
22 Pages

Efficient YOLOv7-Drone: An Enhanced Object Detection Approach for Drone Aerial Imagery

  • Xiaofeng Fu,
  • Guoting Wei,
  • Xia Yuan,
  • Yongshun Liang and
  • Yuming Bo

1 October 2023

In recent years, the rise of low-cost mini rotary-wing drone technology across diverse sectors has emphasized the crucial role of object detection within drone aerial imagery. Low-cost mini rotary-wing drones come with intrinsic limitations, especial...

  • Article
  • Open Access
10 Citations
4,328 Views
22 Pages

1 October 2023

Drone images contain a large number of small, dense targets. And they are vital for agriculture, security, monitoring, and more. However, detecting small objects remains an unsolved challenge, as they occupy a small proportion of the image and have l...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
4,852 Views
18 Pages

29 September 2023

Advancements in aerial mobility (AAM) are driven by needs in transportation, logistics, rescue, and disaster relief. Consequently, large-sized multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with strong power and ample space show great potential. In order...

  • Article
  • Open Access
10 Citations
5,304 Views
27 Pages

Relative Localization within a Quadcopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm Based on Airborne Monocular Vision

  • Xiaokun Si,
  • Guozhen Xu,
  • Mingxing Ke,
  • Haiyan Zhang,
  • Kaixiang Tong and
  • Feng Qi

29 September 2023

Swarming is one of the important trends in the development of small multi-rotor UAVs. The stable operation of UAV swarms and air-to-ground cooperative operations depend on precise relative position information within the swarm. Existing relative loca...

  • Article
  • Open Access
19 Citations
10,490 Views
26 Pages

29 September 2023

This study designs a navigation and landing scheme for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to autonomously land on an arbitrarily moving unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) in GPS-denied environments based on vision, ultra-wideband (UWB) and system informatio...

  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
2,247 Views
30 Pages

27 September 2023

This paper is concerned with the robust collision-free guidance and control of underactuated multirotor aerial vehicles in the presence of moving obstacles capable of accelerating, linear velocity and rotor thrust constraints, and matched model uncer...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
2,348 Views
17 Pages

On Joint Optimization of UAV-Assisted Covert Communication Systems with NOMA for Hydropower Internet of Things

  • Zhenchun Le,
  • Qing Xu,
  • Yining Wang,
  • Guowen Hao,
  • Weifeng Pan,
  • Yanlin Sun and
  • Yuwen Qian

27 September 2023

The intelligent terminals deployed in hydropower IoT can quickly sense the status of hydropower equipment, thus improving the efficiency of system control and operation. However, communication security between the base station and intelligent termina...

  • Article
  • Open Access
5 Citations
2,715 Views
15 Pages

Efficient Focus Autoencoders for Fast Autonomous Flight in Intricate Wild Scenarios

  • Kaiyu Hu,
  • Huanlin Li,
  • Jiafan Zhuang,
  • Zhifeng Hao and
  • Zhun Fan

27 September 2023

The autonomous navigation of aerial robots in unknown and complex outdoor environments is a challenging problem that typically requires planners to generate collision-free trajectories based on human expert rules for fast navigation. Presently, aeria...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
2,297 Views
14 Pages

27 September 2023

Future Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless communication systems are expected to utilize wide bandwidths available at terahertz (THz) frequencies to enhance system throughput. To compensate for the severe path loss in the THz band, it is...

  • Article
  • Open Access
5 Citations
3,997 Views
23 Pages

DB-Tracker: Multi-Object Tracking for Drone Aerial Video Based on Box-MeMBer and MB-OSNet

  • Yubin Yuan,
  • Yiquan Wu,
  • Langyue Zhao,
  • Jinlin Chen and
  • Qichang Zhao

27 September 2023

Drone aerial videos offer a promising future in modern digital media and remote sensing applications, but effectively tracking several objects in these recordings is difficult. Drone aerial footage typically includes complicated sceneries with moving...

  • Article
  • Open Access
27 Citations
4,260 Views
16 Pages

Co-Evolutionary Algorithm-Based Multi-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Cooperative Path Planning

  • Yan Wu,
  • Mingtao Nie,
  • Xiaolei Ma,
  • Yicong Guo and
  • Xiaoxiong Liu

26 September 2023

Multi-UAV cooperative path planning is a key technology to carry out multi-UAV tasks, and its research has important practical significance. A multi-UAV cooperative path is a combination of single-UAV paths, so the idea of problem decomposition is ef...

  • Article
  • Open Access
8 Citations
2,235 Views
16 Pages

26 September 2023

The leaf area index (LAI) is an important indicator for crop growth monitoring. This study aims to analyze the effects of different data fusion strategies on the performance of LAI prediction models, using multisource images from unmanned aerial vehi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
7 Citations
2,244 Views
17 Pages

26 September 2023

Due to the hostile marine environment, there will inevitably be unpredictable factors during the operation of unmanned underwater vehicles, including changes in ocean currents, hull dimensions, and velocity measurement uncertainties. An improved fini...

  • Article
  • Open Access
9 Citations
3,729 Views
21 Pages

26 September 2023

Many birds in the natural world are capable of engaging in sustained soaring within thermal updrafts for extended periods without flapping their wings. Autonomous soaring has the potential to greatly improve both the range and endurance of small dron...

  • Article
  • Open Access
23 Citations
11,057 Views
28 Pages

Material Extrusion Additive Manufacturing of the Composite UAV Used for Search-and-Rescue Missions

  • Sebastian-Marian Zaharia,
  • Ionut Stelian Pascariu,
  • Lucia-Antoneta Chicos,
  • George Razvan Buican,
  • Mihai Alin Pop,
  • Camil Lancea and
  • Valentin Marian Stamate

25 September 2023

The additive processes used in the manufacture of components for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), from composite filaments, have an important advantage compared to classical technologies. This study focused on three-dimensional design, preliminary ae...

  • Article
  • Open Access
6 Citations
11,950 Views
20 Pages

25 September 2023

With the advantages of long-range flight and high payload capacity, large fixed-wing UAVs are often used in anti-terrorism missions, disaster surveillance, and emergency supply delivery. In the existing research, there is little research on the 3D mo...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
7 Citations
3,817 Views
12 Pages

Drone-Based Monitoring to Remotely Assess a Beach Nourishment Program on Lord Howe Island

  • Brendan P. Kelaher,
  • Tommaso Pappagallo,
  • Sebastian Litchfield and
  • Thomas E. Fellowes

25 September 2023

Beach nourishment is a soft engineering technique that is used to combat coastal erosion. To assess the efficacy of a beach nourishment program on the northwest coast of Lord Howe Island, remotely coordinated drone-based monitoring was undertaken at...

  • Article
  • Open Access
11 Citations
7,008 Views
19 Pages

25 September 2023

Biodiversity regulates agroecosystem processes, ensuring stability. Preserving and restoring biodiversity is vital for sustainable agricultural production. Species identification and classification in plant communities are key in biodiversity studies...

  • Article
  • Open Access
5 Citations
3,498 Views
23 Pages

Distributed Control for Multi-Robot Interactive Swarming Using Voronoi Partioning

  • Alexandre Eudes,
  • Sylvain Bertrand,
  • Julien Marzat and
  • Ioannis Sarras

23 September 2023

The problem of safe navigation of a human-multi-robot system is addressed in this paper. More precisely, we propose a novel distributed algorithm to control a swarm of unmanned ground robots interacting with human operators in presence of obstacles....

  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
3,070 Views
23 Pages

22 September 2023

Conformance monitoring supports UTM safety by observing if unmanned aircraft (UA) are adhering to declared operational intent. As a supporting system, robust cooperative tracking is critical. Nevertheless, tracking systems for UAS traffic management...

  • Article
  • Open Access
155 Citations
5,337 Views
22 Pages

MobileRaT: A Lightweight Radio Transformer Method for Automatic Modulation Classification in Drone Communication Systems

  • Qinghe Zheng,
  • Xinyu Tian,
  • Zhiguo Yu,
  • Yao Ding,
  • Abdussalam Elhanashi,
  • Sergio Saponara and
  • Kidiyo Kpalma

22 September 2023

Nowadays, automatic modulation classification (AMC) has become a key component of next-generation drone communication systems, which are crucial for improving communication efficiency in non-cooperative environments. The contradiction between the acc...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
8 Citations
2,842 Views
17 Pages

Reconfiguration for UAV Formation: A Novel Method Based on Modified Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

  • Zipeng Yang,
  • Futing Yang,
  • Tianqi Mao,
  • Zhenyu Xiao,
  • Zhu Han and
  • Xianggen Xia

22 September 2023

The flight formation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) needs to be reconfigured whenever necessary to cope with complex environments and varying tasks. However, the continuity, nonlinearity and high dimensionality of the UAV formation control parame...

Get Alerted

Add your email address to receive forthcoming issues of this journal.

XFacebookLinkedIn
Drones - ISSN 2504-446X