Drones, Volume 7, Issue 2

The performance analysis of an energy constrained Internet of Things (IoT) system with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is provided in this paper. In the considered system, a power beacon is used for the energy supply of a sensor node that has no other...

In the traditional rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) algorithm, the planned path is not smooth, the distance is long, and the fault tolerance rate of the planned path is low. Disturbances in an environment can cause unmanned surface vessels (USVs)...

Transport, rescue, search, surveillance, and disaster relief tasks are some applications that can be developed with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where accurate trajectory tracking is a crucial property to operate in a cluttered environment or und...

Lodging is one of the major issues that seriously affects wheat quality and yield. To obtain timely and accurate wheat lodging information and identify the potential factors leading to lodged wheat in wheat breeding programs, we proposed a lodging-de...

Fully autonomous trajectory planning for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is significant for building the next generation of the logistics industry without human control. This paper presents a method to enable multiple UAVs to fly in the same...

In this article, we consider a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted heterogeneous network in a disaster area, which includes a UAV, ground cellular users, and ground sensor users. The cellular data and sensing data are transmitted to UAVs by...

Coastal cliffs are important in plant ecology as a unique frontier between terrestrial and marine ecosystems. This study piloted close-range photogrammetry with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to clarify floristic patterns using 26 inaccessible coas...

A heterogeneous computing environment has been widely used with UAVs, edge servers, and cloud servers operating in tandem. Various applications can be allocated and linked to the computing nodes that constitute this heterogeneous computing environmen...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more and more widely used in battlefield reconnaissance and target strikes because of their high cost-effectiveness, but task planning for large-scale UAV swarms is a problem that needs to be solved. To so...

The revolution of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPASs), both in the commercial and the research field, has accelerated the arrival of innovative and complex services to the civilian environment within non-segregated airspace. The extensive deplo...

Subterranean openings, including mines, present a unique and challenging environment for robots and autonomous exploration systems. Autonomous robots that are created today will be deployed in harsh and unexplored landscapes that humanity is increasi...

Frequent and dramatic viewpoint changes make loop closure detection of hybrid ground/aerial vehicles extremely challenging. To address this issue, we present a robust and efficient loop closure detection approach based on the state-of-the-art simulta...

Recent years, autonomous drones have attracted attention in many fields due to their convenience. Autonomous drones require precise depth information so as to avoid collision to fly fast and both of RGB image and LiDAR point cloud are often employed...

This paper presents an automatic visual inspection of exterior surface defects of oil tanks using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and image processing with two cascading fuzzy logic algorithms. Corrosion is one of the defects that has a serious effec...

Supporting Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enhanced intelligent applications on the resource-limited Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platform is difficult due to the resource gap between the two. It is promising to partition an AI application into a servi...

Recently, analysis and decision-making based on spatiotemporal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) high-resolution imagery are gaining significant attention in smart agriculture. Constructing a spatiotemporal dataset requires multiple UAV image mosaics tak...

In recent years, multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been widely applied for various applications; however, they are yet to be as commonly utilized in certain industrial transportation applications. Thus, this work designed and implemente...

Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) is a methodology developed by the Joint Authority on Rulemaking for Unmanned Systems (JARUS) for safely conducting and evaluating Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) operations in specific airspace. Man...

Global awareness of environmental issues has boosted interest in renewable energy resources, among which solar energy is one of the most attractive renewable sources. The massive growth of PV plants, both in number and size, has motivated the develop...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in plant protection, and the mechanism of droplet deposition drift while spraying with the 3WQF120-12 produced by Quanfeng Aviation, a representative model of single-rotor plant protection UAVs in...

Unmanned aerial vehicles offer a versatile platform for the realization of phased array antenna systems, enabling multiple antenna elements to be distributed spatially in an agile, flexible, and cost-effective manner. Deploying individual antenna ele...

Power line inspection is an important part of the smart grid. Efficient real-time detection of power devices on the power line is a challenging problem for power line inspection. In recent years, deep learning methods have achieved remarkable results...

This paper investigates the bearing-only formation control problem of a heterogeneous multi-vehicle system, which includes unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (UWSVs). The interactions among vehicles are described by a parti...

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS) has been suggested as a potential communications alternative due to their fast implantation, which makes this resource an ideal solution to provide support in scenarios such as natural disasters or intention...

This study considers the problem of generating optimal, kino-dynamic-feasible, and obstacle-free trajectories for a quadrotor through indoor environments. We explore methods to overcome the challenges faced by quadrotors for indoor settings due to th...

Information about the current biomass state of crops is important to evaluate whether the growth conditions are adequate in terms of water and nutrient supply to determine if there is need to react to diseases and to predict the expected yield. Passi...

This paper proposes a new method that fuses acoustic measurements in the reverberation field and low-accuracy inertial measurement unit (IMU) motion reports for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Different from existing studies that only u...

At this moment, many special vehicles are engaged in illegal activities such as illegal mining, oil and gas theft, the destruction of green spaces, and illegal construction, which have serious negative impacts on the environment and the economy. The...

Aiming at solving the control problem caused by the large-scale change of the Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV) parameters, this paper proposes a design method of backstepping variable structure attitude controller based on Nonlinear Extended State Obse...

UAVs have been contributing substantially to multi-disciplinary research and around 70% of the articles have been published in just about the last five years, with an exponential increase. Primarily, while exploring the literature from the scientific...

The problem of integration of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into the airspace of the Russian Federation is currently receiving increased attention. The conceptual proposals under development define the main directions of regulatory and technological...

Over the past decades, climate change has accelerated the deterioration of heritage sites and archaeological resources in Arctic and subarctic landscapes. At the same time, increased tourism and growing numbers of site visitors contribute to the degr...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are able to provide instantaneous visual cues and a high-level data throughput that could be further leveraged to address complex tasks, such as semantically rich scene understanding. In this work, we built on the use...

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network has gained vigorous evolution in recent decades by virtue of its advanced nature, and UAV-based localization techniques have been extensively applied in a variety of fields. In most applications, the data cap...

The construction industry is on the path to digital transformation. One of the main challenges in this process is inspecting, assessing, and maintaining civil infrastructures and construction elements. However, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Unmann...

In an urban and uncontrolled environment, the presence of mixed traffic of autonomous vehicles, classical vehicles, vulnerable road users, e.g., pedestrians, and unprecedented dynamic events makes it challenging for the classical autonomous vehicle t...

A key challenge in the use of drones for an aerial manipulation task such as cutting tree branches is the control problem, especially in the presence of an unpredictable and nonlinear environment. While prior work focused on simplifying the problem b...

Because of their low expense and ease of rapid deployment, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are frequently applied in wireless networks. Although the wireless channel is able to broadcast, legitimate communications between UAVs and ground nodes are in...

The bottleneck in plant breeding programs is to have cost-effective high-throughput phenotyping methodologies to efficiently describe the new lines and hybrids developed. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic approach to overcome not only the i...

This paper presents a study on a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fault-tolerant control scheme. According to the attitude model and safety control of the aircraft under the uncertainty of inertial matrix, the attitude state constraint by rein...

This paper proposes a fault tolerant control strategy for drone interceptors with fixed wings and reaction jets subject to actuator faults. The drone interceptors have both continuous and discrete actuators, which pose a challenge to the control syst...

Inventive approaches are constantly being revealed in the field of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) configuration concepts and designs. To date, a body-associated configuration of UAVs for augmented lift remains uncl...

Rockfalls present a significant hazard to human activities; therefore, their identification and knowledge about potential spatial impacts are important in planning protection measures to reduce rockfall risk. Remote sensing with unmanned aerial vehic...

In this work, we train controllers (models) using Genetic Fuzzy Methodology (GFM) for learning cooperative behavior in a team of decentralized UAVs to transport a shared slung payload. The training is done in a reinforcement learning fashion where th...

Fixed-wing, solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs) can use thermals to expand the duration of flight. Nevertheless, due to the demand for calculating the thermal state parameters of the SUAV during flight, the existing methods still have some...

The structural analysis of degraded historical buildings requires an adequate 3D model of the object. Structure from motion (SfM) photogrammetry and laser scanning geomatics techniques can satisfy this request by providing geometrically affordable da...

When military and civil missions such as transportation increase, fault tolerant control of unmanned aerial vehicles will be an obligation. Although onboard sensors provide information about the status of a quadrotor, the camera is not included in th...

Free-space optical (FSO) communication promises to bring fibre-like speeds to data transmissions between ground, sky and space. This is becoming more important in light of the increasing volume of data collected by aircraft and spacecraft. The Univer...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) are the promising emerging technologies proposed for the 6th-Generation (6G) network to improve the capacity, reliability, and coverage of wireless communications. By integ...

Disease detection in plants is essential for food security and economic stability. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery and artificial intelligence (AI) are valuable tools for it. The purpose of this review is to gather several methods used by our p...