Autonomous vision-based aerial grasping is an essential and challenging task for aerial manipulation missions. In this paper, we propose a vision-based aerial grasping system for a Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to grasp a target object. Th...
In this paper, we examine potential methods for autonomously tracking and landing multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a complex yet essential problem. Autonomous tracking and landing control technology utilizes visual navigation, relying sol...
The exponential growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones in recent years has raised concerns about their safe operation, especially in beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) scenarios. Existing unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) heavil...
Promising massive emissions reduction and energy savings, the utilization of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in last-mile parcel delivery is continuously expanding. However, the limited UAV range deters their widescale adoption to replace...
Rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the ability to operate in confined spaces and to hover over point of interest, but they have limited flight time and endurance. Conventional contact-based charging system for UAVs has been used, but it...
Integrating autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with fifth-generation (5G) networks presents a significant challenge due to network interference. UAVs’ high altitude and propagation conditions increase vulnerability to interference from...
Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) landing can be useful in multiple applications. Precise landing is a difficult task because of the significant navigation errors of the global positioning system (GPS). To overcome these errors and to realize...
We present technical advances and methods to measure effective broadband physical albedo in snowy mountain headwaters using a prototype dual-sensor pyranometer mounted on an Autonomous Aerial Vehicle (an AAV). Our test flights over snowy meadows and...
Landing on unmanned surface vehicles (USV) autonomously is a critical task for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) due to complex environments. To solve this problem, an autonomous landing method is proposed based on a multi-level marker and linear active...
The increasing number of intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) is leading to a growing scarcity of spectrum resources for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which has created an urgent need for the use of full-duplex non-orthogonal multiple access (FD-N...
In scenarios where global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) and radio navigation systems are denied, vision-based autonomous landing (VAL) for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) becomes essential. Accurate and real-time runway detection in...
The use of robotic systems, especially multi-rotor aerial vehicles, in the documentation of historical buildings and cultural heritage monuments has become common in recent years. However, the teleoperated robotic systems have significant limitations...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are increasingly becoming a popular tool in the observation and study of marine mammals. However, the potential capabilities of these vehicles regarding autonomous operations are not being fully exploited for passive un...
Interest in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has increased due to their versatility and variety of applications, however their battery life limits their applications. Heterogeneous multi-robot systems can offer a solution to this limitation, by allowi...
Traditional methods on crack inspection for large infrastructures require a number of structural health inspection devices and instruments. They usually use the signal changes caused by physical deformations from cracks to detect the cracks, which is...
The foldable quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), transported by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and launched subaquatically, represents cutting-edge technology for expanding ocean-sensing capabilities. However, its launch stability is se...
The number of aerial- and ground-based unmanned vehicles and operations is expected to significantly expand in the near future. While aviation traditionally has an excellent safety record in managing conflicts, the current approaches will not be able...
This paper introduces a fuzzy logic-based autonomous ship deck landing system for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The ship is assumed to maintain a constant course and speed. The aim of this fuzzy logic landing model is to simplify the ta...
The adoption of novel technologies such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Search and Rescue (SAR) operations remains limited. As a result, their full potential is not yet realized. Although UAVs have been deployed on an ad hoc basis, typically un...
This paper presents an autonomous unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV) tracking system based on an improved long and short-term memory (LSTM) Kalman filter (KF) model. The system can estimate the three-dimensional (3D) attitude and precisely track the targe...
Decision-making for autonomous maneuvering in dynamic, uncertain, and nonlinear environments represents a challenging frontier problem. Deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) is an effective method to solve such problems, but it is found that comp...
Automation enhances the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by enabling self-determined behavior, while reducing the need for extensive human involvement. Future concepts envision a single human operator commanding multiple autonomous UAV...
Advanced Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (ARAIM) is an evolution of the currently used aviation-focused Global Navigation Satellite System integrity service, Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM). Where RAIM supports only lateral n...
Personal assistant robots provide novel technological solutions in order to monitor people’s activities, helping them in their daily lives. In this sense, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can also bring forward a present and future model of assi...
With the arrival of sixth-generation (6G) wireless systems comes radical potential for the deployment of autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) swarms in mission-critical applications, ranging from disaster rescue to intelligent transportation. However, 6G-...
In ad hoc networks employing Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs), the importance of real-time applications and edge computing is steadily increasing. However, existing routing protocols still fail to meet the strict performance requirements under the u...
The intensity and frequency of bushfires have increased significantly, destroying property and living species in recent years. Presently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology advancements are becoming increasingly popular in bushfire management s...
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, are already an integral part of the equipment used by firefighters to monitor wildfires. They are, however, still typically used only as remotely operated, mobile sensing platforms under direct real-time control o...
Accurate and reliable relative navigation is the prerequisite to guarantee the effectiveness and safety of various multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) cooperation tasks, when absolute position information is unavailable or inaccurate. Among the...
This paper introduces an autonomous vision-based tracking system for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with an onboard camera, designed to track a maneuvering target without external localization sensors or GPS. Accurate capture of d...
Autonomous navigation of micro aerial vehicles in unknown environments not only requires exploring their time-varying surroundings, but also ensuring the complete safety of flights at all times. The current research addresses estimation of the potent...
We present a three-dimensional (3D) intersection traffic management platform for small autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), particularly quadcopters, in urban airspace. Assuming many autonomous UAVs are approaching a shared airspace, where UAV...
In this paper, solutions for precise maneuvering of an autonomous small (e.g., 350-class) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are designed and implemented from smart modifications of non expensive mass market technologies. The considered class of vehicle...
Mapping and exploration are important tasks of mobile robots for various applications such as search and rescue, inspection, and surveillance. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are more suited for such tasks because they have a large field of view comp...
The yield and quality of rice are closely related to field management. The automatic identification of field abnormalities, such as diseases and pests, based on computer vision currently mainly relies on high spatial resolution (HSR) images obtained...
Advanced Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (ARAIM) represents an advancement over RAIM, designed to utilize dual-frequency and multi-constellation technologies. Originally developed for aviation, the European Commission (EC) is now exploring i...
The following paper presents a method for the use of a virtual electric dipole potential field to control a leader-follower formation of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The proposed control algorithm uses a virtual electric dipole potenti...
This paper presents the implementation of an innovative solution based on heterogeneous autonomous vehicles to tackle maritime pollution (in particular, oil spills). This solution is based on native microbial consortia with bioremediation capacity, a...
There are activities in viticulture and mariculture that require extreme physical endurance from human workers, making them prime candidates for automation and robotization. This paper presents a novel, practical, heterogeneous, autonomous robotic sy...
Recent advancements in the field of machine learning (ML) provide opportunity to conduct research on autonomous devices for a variety of applications. Intelligent decision-making is a critical task for self-driving systems. An attempt is made in this...
The special issue, “Sensors, Wireless Connectivity and Systems for Autonomous Vehicles and Smart Mobility” on MDPI Sensors presents 12 accepted papers, with authors from North America, Asia, Europe and Australia, related to the emerging t...
In the realm of autonomous aerial refueling missions for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the controllable drogue represents a novel approach that significantly enhances both the safety and efficiency of aerial refueling operations. This paper delves...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are utilized for wireless communication support of Internet of Intelligent Vehicles (IoVs). Intelligent vehicles (IVs) need vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) wireless communication for real-time...
A time-efficient path plan algorithm is important for the real-time navigation of a fixed-wing autonomous aerial vehicle in unknown 3D obstacle-rich environments. Note that a fixed-wing aerial vehicle can freely move in 3D environments, not in 2D env...
Robot cooperation is key in Search and Rescue (SaR) tasks. Frequently, these tasks take place in complex scenarios affected by different types of disasters, so an aerial viewpoint is useful for autonomous navigation or human tele-operation. In such c...
Efficient and reliable inventory management remains a challenge in modern warehouses, where manual counting is time-consuming, error-prone, and costly. We present an autonomous aerial–ground system for warehouse inventory data capture that oper...
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are omnipresent and have grown in popularity due to their wide potential use in many civilian sectors. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and communication devices, drones can potentially fo...
Small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles are being deployed in urban areas for missions such as ground target tracking, crime scene monitoring, and traffic management. Aerial vehicles deployed in such cluttered environments are required to have robust au...
Connected and Autonomous Electric Vehicles (CAEVs) and Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are critical components of future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), yet their deployment remains constrained by fragmented charging infrastructures and the...
Unmanned aerial vehicles are gaining popularity in an ever-increasing range of applications, mainly because they are able to navigate autonomously. In this work, we describe a simulation framework that can help engineering students who are starting o...
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