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Drones, Volume 7, Issue 2

2023 February - 82 articles

Cover Story: We propose a fully automatic approach to overcome not only individual maize extraction but also the trait quantification challenge of structural components from unmanned aerial system (UAS) imagery. For that, two flights were performed over maize trials using a camera onboard a UAS platform. RGB images were processed using a standard photogrammetric pipeline to obtain a final scaled 3D point cloud. Individual plants were extracted using deep learning. Next, we employed a connected component algorithm to the maize endmembers. Finally, we robustly applied a Laplacian-based contraction skeleton algorithm to compute several structural component traits from each plant. Our test trial reveals the viability of computing 3D phenotypic traits of maize on the basis of a UAS imagery-based point cloud. View this paper
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Articles (82)

  • Article
  • Open Access
6 Citations
2,786 Views
16 Pages

Capacity Analysis of Power Beacon-Assisted Industrial IoT System with UAV Data Collector

  • Aleksandra Cvetković,
  • Vesna Blagojević and
  • Jelena Manojlović

20 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
17 Citations
3,829 Views
22 Pages

A Path-Planning Method Considering Environmental Disturbance Based on VPF-RRT*

  • Zhihao Chen,
  • Jiabin Yu,
  • Zhiyao Zhao,
  • Xiaoyi Wang and
  • Yang Chen

20 February 2023

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)...

  • Article
  • Open Access
15 Citations
5,529 Views
23 Pages

A Comparative Study between NMPC and Baseline Feedback Controllers for UAV Trajectory Tracking

  • Bryan S. Guevara,
  • Luis F. Recalde,
  • José Varela-Aldás,
  • Victor H. Andaluz,
  • Daniel C. Gandolfo and
  • Juan M. Toibero

20 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
26 Citations
3,517 Views
14 Pages

Wheat Lodging Segmentation Based on Lstm_PSPNet Deep Learning Network

  • Jun Yu,
  • Tao Cheng,
  • Ning Cai,
  • Xin-Gen Zhou,
  • Zhihua Diao,
  • Tianyi Wang,
  • Shizhou Du,
  • Dong Liang and
  • Dongyan Zhang

18 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
11 Citations
4,370 Views
29 Pages

Trajectory Planning for Multiple UAVs and Hierarchical Collision Avoidance Based on Nonlinear Kalman Filters

  • Warunyu Hematulin,
  • Patcharin Kamsing,
  • Peerapong Torteeka,
  • Thanaporn Somjit,
  • Thaweerath Phisannupawong and
  • Tanatthep Jarawan

18 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
13 Citations
3,765 Views
21 Pages

17 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
11 Citations
2,842 Views
16 Pages

Piloting an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to Explore the Floristic Variations of Inaccessible Cliffs along Island Coasts

  • Seongjun Kim,
  • Chang Woo Lee,
  • Hwan-Joon Park,
  • Byoung-Doo Lee,
  • Nam Young Kim,
  • Jung Eun Hwang,
  • Hyeong Bin Park,
  • Jiae An and
  • JuHyoung Baek

17 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
15 Citations
6,100 Views
22 Pages

A Computation Offloading Scheme for UAV-Edge Cloud Computing Environments Considering Energy Consumption Fairness

  • Bongjae Kim,
  • Joonhyouk Jang,
  • Jinman Jung,
  • Jungkyu Han,
  • Junyoung Heo and
  • Hong Min

16 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
32 Citations
4,404 Views
22 Pages

A Distributed Collaborative Allocation Method of Reconnaissance and Strike Tasks for Heterogeneous UAVs

  • Hanqiang Deng,
  • Jian Huang,
  • Quan Liu,
  • Tuo Zhao,
  • Cong Zhou and
  • Jialong Gao

15 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
3,263 Views
18 Pages

Communication Manager for Hyper-Connected RPAS Environments

  • Victor Sanchez-Aguero,
  • Francisco Valera,
  • Ivan Vidal and
  • Borja Nogales

15 February 2023

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...

  • Review
  • Open Access
64 Citations
15,924 Views
54 Pages

Configurations and Applications of Multi-Agent Hybrid Drone/Unmanned Ground Vehicle for Underground Environments: A Review

  • Chris Dinelli,
  • John Racette,
  • Mario Escarcega,
  • Simon Lotero,
  • Jeffrey Gordon,
  • James Montoya,
  • Chase Dunaway,
  • Vasileios Androulakis,
  • Hassan Khaniani and
  • Mostafa Hassanalian
  • + 2 authors

14 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
11 Citations
4,226 Views
20 Pages

14 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
6 Citations
7,233 Views
17 Pages

Fast and High-Quality Monocular Depth Estimation with Optical Flow for Autonomous Drones

  • Tomoyasu Shimada,
  • Hiroki Nishikawa,
  • Xiangbo Kong and
  • Hiroyuki Tomiyama

14 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
14 Citations
4,837 Views
25 Pages

An Automatic Visual Inspection of Oil Tanks Exterior Surface Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Image Processing and Cascading Fuzzy Logic Algorithms

  • Mohammed A. H. Ali,
  • Muhammad Baggash,
  • Jaloliddin Rustamov,
  • Rawad Abdulghafor,
  • Najm Al-Deen N. Abdo,
  • Mubarak H. G. Abdo,
  • Talep S. Mohammed,
  • Ameen A. Hasan,
  • Ali N. Abdo and
  • Yusoff Nukman
  • + 1 author

13 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
12 Citations
3,186 Views
23 Pages

Service Function Chain Scheduling in Heterogeneous Multi-UAV Edge Computing

  • Yangang Wang,
  • Hai Wang,
  • Xianglin Wei,
  • Kuang Zhao,
  • Jianhua Fan,
  • Juan Chen,
  • Yongyang Hu and
  • Runa Jia

13 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
3,010 Views
23 Pages

Two-Step Approach toward Alignment of Spatiotemporal Wide-Area Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imageries

  • Hyeonseok Lee,
  • Semo Kim,
  • Dohun Lim,
  • Seoung-Hun Bae,
  • Lae-Hyong Kang and
  • Sungchan Kim

12 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
26 Citations
6,364 Views
21 Pages

Design and Implementation of UAV Velocity Controller Based on Reference Model Sliding Mode Control

  • Qi Wang,
  • Wei Wang,
  • Satoshi Suzuki,
  • Akio Namiki,
  • Hongxun Liu and
  • Ziran Li

10 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
4,222 Views
21 Pages

10 February 2023

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...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
16 Citations
5,059 Views
20 Pages

SunMap: Towards Unattended Maintenance of Photovoltaic Plants Using Drone Photogrammetry

  • David Hernández-López,
  • Esteban Ruíz de Oña,
  • Miguel A. Moreno and
  • Diego González-Aguilera

10 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
16 Citations
4,354 Views
21 Pages

10 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
9 Citations
6,046 Views
14 Pages

Distributed Antenna in Drone Swarms: A Feasibility Study

  • Stuart William Harmer and
  • Gianluca De Novi

10 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
21 Citations
5,846 Views
22 Pages

10 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
22 Citations
4,077 Views
20 Pages

Distributed Bearing-Only Formation Control for UAV-UWSV Heterogeneous System

  • Shaoshi Li,
  • Xingjian Wang,
  • Shaoping Wang and
  • Yuwei Zhang

10 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
36 Citations
7,908 Views
34 Pages

9 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
12 Citations
10,174 Views
24 Pages

9 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
5 Citations
2,825 Views
15 Pages

Sensitivity of LiDAR Parameters to Aboveground Biomass in Winter Spelt

  • Carsten Montzka,
  • Marco Donat,
  • Rahul Raj,
  • Philipp Welter and
  • Jordan Steven Bates

9 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
7 Citations
4,118 Views
24 Pages

9 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
53 Citations
7,241 Views
18 Pages

8 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
3,127 Views
22 Pages

8 February 2023

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...

  • Systematic Review
  • Open Access
32 Citations
10,306 Views
19 Pages

A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on Autonomous Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

  • Anees ul Husnain,
  • Norrima Mokhtar,
  • Noraisyah Mohamed Shah,
  • Mahidzal Dahari and
  • Masahiro Iwahashi

8 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
5 Citations
3,029 Views
13 Pages

Strategies for Passing Regulatory Procedures during the Operational Phase of Unmanned Aircraft Systems

  • Alexander Serebryakov,
  • Maksim Raduntsev,
  • Natalya Prosvirina and
  • Andrey Zamkovoi

8 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
10 Citations
6,085 Views
15 Pages

8 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
56 Citations
12,304 Views
15 Pages

8 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
8 Citations
2,883 Views
18 Pages

7 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
22 Citations
6,006 Views
23 Pages

Object Detection-Based System for Traffic Signs on Drone-Captured Images

  • Manuel Naranjo,
  • Diego Fuentes,
  • Elena Muelas,
  • Enrique Díez,
  • Luis Ciruelo,
  • César Alonso,
  • Eduardo Abenza,
  • Roberto Gómez-Espinosa and
  • Inmaculada Luengo

7 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
12 Citations
15,436 Views
28 Pages

CARLA+: An Evolution of the CARLA Simulator for Complex Environment Using a Probabilistic Graphical Model

  • Sumbal Malik,
  • Manzoor Ahmed Khan,
  • Aadam,
  • Hesham El-Sayed,
  • Farkhund Iqbal,
  • Jalal Khan and
  • Obaid Ullah

7 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
9 Citations
3,431 Views
21 Pages

6 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
6 Citations
3,743 Views
18 Pages

6 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
9 Citations
3,982 Views
16 Pages

4 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
5 Citations
4,232 Views
18 Pages

4 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
6 Citations
2,671 Views
17 Pages

3 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
7,067 Views
15 Pages

3 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
8 Citations
5,031 Views
32 Pages

3 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
5 Citations
3,158 Views
15 Pages

3 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
2,359 Views
17 Pages

3 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
25 Citations
4,581 Views
21 Pages

1 February 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
6 Citations
3,197 Views
17 Pages

31 January 2023

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...

  • Technical Note
  • Open Access
3 Citations
6,316 Views
9 Pages

Ground-to-Drone Optical Pulse Position Modulation Demonstration as a Testbed for Lunar Communications

  • Skevos F. E. Karpathakis,
  • Benjamin P. Dix-Matthews,
  • Shane M. Walsh,
  • Ayden S. McCann,
  • David R. Gozzard,
  • Alex M. Frost,
  • Charles T. Gravestock and
  • Sascha W. Schediwy

31 January 2023

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...

  • Article
  • Open Access
19 Citations
5,114 Views
17 Pages

31 January 2023

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...

  • Review
  • Open Access
15 Citations
5,161 Views
32 Pages

30 January 2023

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...

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Drones - ISSN 2504-446X