Drones, Volume 8, Issue 2

Intrusion detection is often used in scenarios such as airports and essential facilities. Based on UAVs equipped with optical payloads, intrusion detection from an aerial perspective can be realized. However, due to the limited field of view of the c...

In the face of external disturbances affecting the trajectory tracking of quadrotors, a control scheme targeted at accurate position and attitude trajectory tracking was designed. Initially, a quadrotor dynamic model, essential for control design, wa...

Efficient trajectory and path planning (TPP) is essential for unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) autonomy in challenging environments. Despite the scale ambiguity inherent in monocular vision, characteristics like compact size make a monocular camera i...

UAV rotors are at a high risk of ice accumulation during their operations in icing conditions. Thermal ice protection systems (IPSs) are being employed as a means of protecting rotor blades from ice, yet designing the appropriate IPS with the require...

Aerial wildlife surveys with fixed-wing airplanes and helicopters are used more often than on-the-ground field surveys to cover areas that are both extensive and often inaccessible. Drones with high-resolution thermal sensors are being widely accepte...

Integrating the relaying drone and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique into post-disaster emergency communications (PDEComs) is a promising way to accomplish efficient network recovery. Motivated by the above, by optimizing the drone thre...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a compelling alternative to manned operations, offering the capability to navigate hazardous environments without risks for human operators. Despite their potential, optimizing UAV missions in complex a...

Monitoring and mapping crop water stress and variability at a farm scale for cereals such as maize, one of the most common crops in developing countries with 200 million people around the world, is an important objective within precision agriculture....

Traditional unmanned aerial vehicle path planning methods focus on addressing planning issues in static scenes, struggle to balance optimality and real-time performance, and are prone to local optima. In this paper, we propose an improved deep reinfo...

Whirl flutter is a phenomenon caused by an aeroelastic instability, causing oscillations to propagate in manned or unmanned rotor-nacelle type aircraft. Under the conditions where multi-segmented freeplay are present, complex behaviors can dominate t...

This paper proposes a cascaded dual closed-loop control strategy that incorporates time delay estimation and sliding mode control (SMC) to address the issue of uncertain disturbances in logistic unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) caused by ground effect...

The advancement of wireless networking has significantly enhanced beamforming capabilities in Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems (AUAS). This paper presents a simple and efficient classical algorithm to route a collection of AUAS or drone swarms exte...

The increasing number of applications involving the use of UAVs has motivated the research for design considerations that increase the safety, endurance, range, and payload capability of these vehicles. In this article, the dynamics of a flexible fla...

Object recognition, localization, and tracking play a role of primordial importance in computer vision applications. However, it is still an extremely difficult task, particularly in scenarios where objects are attended to using fast-moving UAVs that...

Unoccupied aerial systems (UASs) may provide cheaper, safer, and more accurate and precise alternatives to traditional waterfowl survey techniques while also reducing disturbance to waterfowl. We evaluated availability and perception bias based on ma...

Infrared thermal imaging is useful for human body recognition for search and rescue (SAR) missions. This paper discusses thermal object tracking for SAR missions with a drone. The entire process consists of object detection and multiple-target tracki...

Complex coastal environments pose unique logistical challenges when deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for real-time image acquisition during monitoring operations of marine water quality. One of the key challenges is the difficulty in synchro...

As the technology of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) advances, these vehicles are increasingly being used in various industries. However, the navigation of UAVs often faces restrictions and obstacles, necessitating the implementation of path-planning...

In contrast to rotorcraft, fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) encounter a unique challenge in path planning due to the necessity of accounting for the turning radius constraint. This research focuses on coverage path planning, aiming to deter...

Traditional Internet of Things (IoT) networks have limited coverage and may experience failures due to natural disasters affecting critical IoT devices, making it difficult for them to provide communication services. Therefore, how to establish netwo...

Drones are becoming increasingly valuable tools for studying species in marine environments. Here, a consumer-grade drone was used to elucidate the distribution and population abundance of two threatened dasyatid rays, Pastinachus ater and Urogymnus ...

The deployment of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, for transmission line inspections, has brought attention to the potential impact of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) on UAV operations. This work describes a mathematical model based on...

As the application of UAVs becomes more and more widespread, accidents such as accidental injuries to personnel, property damage, and loss and destruction of UAVs due to accidental UAV crashes also occur in daily use scenarios. To reduce the occurren...

The primary objectives of this paper are to test an adaptive sampling method for an autonomous underwater vehicle, specifically tailored to track a hydrocarbon plume in the water column. An overview of the simulation of the developed applications wit...

Currently, space-based information networks, represented by satellite Internet, are rapidly developing. UAVs can serve as airborne mobile terminals, representing a novel node in satellite IoT, offering more accurate and robust data streaming for conn...

The present study proposes a technique for automated tree crown detection and segmentation in digital images derived from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using a machine learning (ML) algorithm named Detectron2. The technique, which was developed in...

Unmanned aerial systems and renewable energy are two research areas that have developed rapidly over the last few decades. Solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs) are likely to become dominant in the near future. They have the advantage of low...

This paper proposes a trajectory tracking control scheme consisting of a fast finite-time super-twisting sliding mode control (FSTSMC) approach and an extended state higher-order sliding mode observer (ESHSMO) for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs)...

Drones are an increasingly popular choice for wildlife surveys due to their versatility, quick response capabilities, and ability to access remote areas while covering large regions. A novel application presented here is to combine drone imagery with...

Forest fires have significant implications for the Earth’s ecological balance, causing widespread devastation and posing formidable challenges for containment once they propagate. The development of computer vision methods holds promise in faci...

Amphibious (air and water) drones, capable of both aerial and aquatic operations, have the potential to provide valuable drone applications in aquatic environments. However, the limited range of wireless data transmission caused by the low antenna he...

This paper describes the deployment, integration, and demonstration of the Smartphone Video Guidance Sensor (SVGS) as novel technology for autonomous 6-DOF proximity maneuvers and high-altitude precision landing of UAVs via sensor fusion. The propose...

Close-range remote sensing techniques employing multispectral sensors on unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer both advantages and drawbacks in comparison to traditional remote sensing using satellite-mounted sensors. Close-range remote sensing tec...

Payload transportation and manipulation by rotorcraft drones are receiving a lot of attention from the military, industrial and logistics research areas. The interactions between the UAV and the payload, plus the means of object attachment or manipul...

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and the Internet of Flying Vehicles (IoFV) are integral components of intelligent transportation systems with the potential to revolutionize the way we move people and goods. Although both the IoV and IoFV share a commo...

Autonomous navigation of drones using computer vision has achieved promising performance. Nano-sized drones based on edge computing platforms are lightweight, flexible, and cheap; thus, they are suitable for exploring narrow spaces. However, due to t...

Networks constructed in the sky are known as non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). As an example of an NTN, relay transmission using drones as radio stations enables flexible network construction in the air by performing handovers with ground stations. Ho...