Top Research Papers on UAV

Abstract During recent years, advances in drone technologies have made them applicable in various fields of industry, and their popularity continues to grow. In this paper, the academic contributions on drones routing problems are analyzed between 2005 and 2019 to identify the main characteristics of these types of problems, as well as the research trends and recent improvements. The literature is classified according to the objectives optimized, solution methods, applications, constraints, and whether they use a complementary vehicle or not. Finally, a discussion for trends and future researc...

A comprehensive study on UAVs, swarms, types, classification, charging, and standardization is presented, highlighting the importance of drones, goals and functionality problems, and identifying the research gap.

This paper represents the result of the IAEG C35 Commission “Monitoring methods and approaches in engineering geology applications” workgroup aimed to describe a general overview of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their potentiality in several engineering geological applications.

Agriculture is the primary source of income in developing countries like India. Agriculture accounts for 17 percent of India’s total GDP, with almost 60 percent of the people directly or indirectly employed. While researchers and planters focus on a variety of elements to boost productivity, crop loss due to disease is one of the most serious issues they confront. Crop growth monitoring and early detection of pest infestations are still a problem. With the expansion of cultivation to wider fields, manual intervention to monitor and diagnose insect and pest infestations is becoming increasingly...

An in-depth survey of different collision avoidance techniques that are categorically explained along with a comparative analysis of the considered approaches w.r.t. different scenarios and technical aspects is provided.

A special detection method for small objects in UAV perspective based on YOLOv3, the Resblock in darknet is first optimized by concatenating two ResNet units that have the same width and height and the entire darknet structure is improved by increasing convolution operation at an early layer to enrich spatial information.

A smart traffic surveillance system based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) using 5G technology that covers the existing limitations of the SAHER system deployed in KSA and will further reduce the number of accidents and fatalities and injuries caused by it.

The generated model achieved the 2015 ASPRS accuracy standards for digital geospatial data, while horizontal RMSE values were 4– 6 cm and vertical accuracy was 5–6 cm.

A fisheye-based action recognition method that mitigates the distortions in fisHEye videos via learning unbounded transformations guided by flat RGB videos is proposed, and experiments show the efficacy of this method on the UAV-Human dataset.

This work additionally explores the technical standardisation landscape and highlights synergies between scientific research and standardisation efforts towards enabling safe UAV operations, while taking into consideration additional IoT inherent challenges such as security, data protection and privacy.

The lightweight Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight activities are constrained, particularly in the UAV range or activity span and perseverance, by the strategic correspondence link capabilities. This paper tends to the different overlap issue of trading off a set of mission prerequisites, the UAV execution parameters, and strategic credibility; thus compromising between the communication load characterized by a crucial, communication link transmitting power necessities, power accessibility onboard UAV as a weight-restricted parameter, and the UAV security.

Precision agriculture and Smart farming have become the essential backbone for sustainable agricultural production by leveraging cutting edge remote sensing and communication technologies, meshed with AI driven data processing and decision making approaches. Agricultural segments, such as crop and livestock monitoring, crop/plant classification, yield prediction, weed detection, automatic harvesting, early detection, and prevention of diseases are being served for efficient, cost-effective process monitoring with increased profitability. With the remarkable development in recent decades, Unman...

Mangrove ecosystems are targeted for many conservation and rehabilitation efforts due to their ability to store large amounts of carbon in their living biomass and soil. Traditional methods to monitor above-ground biomass (AGB) rely on on-ground measurements, which are expensive, labour intensive and cover small spatial scales. Structure from Motion and Multi-View Stereo reconstructions from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles imagery (UAV-SfM) have the potential to increase fieldwork efficiency by providing a greater amount of spatial information in less time. However, there is still a need to assess th...

A streamlined bridge inspection system that offers advanced data analytics tools to automatically identify type, extent, growth, and 3D location of defects using computer vision techniques and establish a georeferenced element-wise as-built bridge information model to document and visualize damage information is proposed.

This survey paper may be a useful tutorial for understanding the types of landing zones and landing zone detection techniques for the UAVs, the strengths of zone detection algorithms, and the open areas for future improvement and research.

A novel hybrid algorithm called HSGWO-MSOS is proposed by combining simplified grey wolf optimizer (SGWO) and modified symbiotic organisms search (MSOS) and its performance is superior to the GWO, SOS and SA algorithm.

For both the positive economic benefit and the negative ecological impact of the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in tropical developing countries, it is significant to achieve accurate detection for oil palm trees in large-scale areas. Especially, growing status observation and smart oil palm plantation management enabled by such accurate detections would improve plantation planning, oil palm yield, and reduce manpower and consumption of fertilizer. Although existing studies have already reached a high accuracy in oil palm tree detection, rare attention has been paid to automated obser...

It can be stated that progress in advanced image processing techniques and technologies used in the construction of UAVs will lead to an explosion in the number of applications, which will result in increased benefits for society, reducing unpleasant situations, such as congestion and collisions in major urban centers of the world.

The conclusion is that IoT and UAV are two of the most important technologies that transform traditional cultivation practices into a new perspective of intelligence in precision agriculture.

This work aims at providing the reader with an overview of the agronomical use of unmanned aerial vehicles by providing a classification of the vehicles according to their typology and main sensorial and performance features.

Basic information is provided to quantify the effect of wind speeds and droplet sizes on UAV spray drift potential which supports on-going regulatory guideline development for spray buffer zone and drift risk assessment protocols.

This study provides a comprehensive review of UAVs, types, swarms, classifications, charging methods and regulations, and believes insights into the potentials and functionality issues will serve as guidelines and motivations for relevant researchers.

The HIT-UAV is the first publicly available high-altitude UAV-based infrared thermal dataset for detecting persons and vehicles and the detection algorithms perform exceptionally well, since infrared thermal images do not contain significant irrelevant information about objects.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, UAS, drones) combined with Structure-from-Motion (SfM) photogrammetry have emerged over the last decade as the basis for a very efficient workflow in glacial and periglacial geomorphology by filling the spatial gap between traditional ground-based surveys and aerial or satellite remote sensing data. UAV-generated data offer flexible spatial and temporal resolution, thus enabling a shift from a pure description of geomorphological forms to a better understanding of process-form relationships, e.g., by quantification of short-term landscape changes in response to ...

A critical review of UAV reliability literature in both theoretical and practical research is presented, pinpointing failure causes and reliability challenges of Uav systems, classifying and reflecting on the reliability modeling, analysis, and design methods for UAV systems and key subsystems.

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained popularity due to their flexibility, mobility, and accessibility in various fields, including search and rescue (SAR) operations. The use of UAVs in SAR can greatly enhance the task success rates in reaching inaccessible or dangerous areas, performing challenging operations, and providing real-time monitoring and modeling of the situation. This article aims to help readers understand the latest progress and trends in this field by synthesizing and organizing papers related to UAV search and rescue. An introduction to the various type...

A roadmap to understand the successive development of advanced drones/ UAVs in terms of their geometric structure, flying mechanism, sensing and vision ability, aviation quality, path planning, intelligent behaviour and adoptability is presented.

A thorough treatment of UAV wireless communications and networking research challenges and opportunities, Featuring discussion of practical applications including drone delivery systems, public safety, IoT, virtual reality, and smart cities, is provided.

Various applications of blockchain in UAV networks such as network security, decentralized storage, inventory management, surveillance, etc., are reviewed and various challenges to be addressed in the integration of blockchain and UAVs are discussed.

Overall, UAV-LARS has demonstrated great potential as a tool for monitoring agriculture at fine- and regional-scales and suggestions for overcoming current limitations are provided.

Advances in computer vision algorithms to extract key features from UAV acquired videos and images are discussed along with the discussion on improvements made in traffic flow analysis methods, risk assessment and assistance in accident investigation and damage assessments for bridges and pavements.

This research evaluates the positional accuracy of the real-time kinematics (RTK) GNSS on the DJI Matrice 600 Pro, one of the first available and widely used UAVs with potentially surveying-grade performance.

A novel reinforcement learning based grey wolf optimizer algorithm called RLGWO has been presented for solving the problem of feasible and effective route acquisition in three-dimensional complex flight environment.

This paper sheds light on three UAV-enabled mobile edge computing (MEC) architectures, and presents a comprehensive survey for the state-of-the-art research in this domain.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are used to form a cognitive mobile computing network for co-operative search and rescue, and reinforcement learning (RL) is used to plan search path and improve communication throughput.

A vehicle-assisted computing offloading architecture for UAVs is proposed to improve offloading efficiency by harnessing the moving vehicles in smart city and demonstrates that the proposed offloading scheme can significantly save resource and improve the utilities of UAV's and vehicles.

As a new type of aerial robotics, drones are easy to use and inexpensive, which has facilitated their acquisition by individuals and organizations. This unequivocal and widespread presence of amateur drones may cause many dangers, such as privacy breaches by reaching sensitive locations of authorities and individuals. In this paper, we summarize the performance-affecting factors and major obstacles to drone use and provide a brief background of deep learning. Then, we summarize the types of UAVs and the related unethical behaviors, safety, privacy, and cybersecurity concerns. Then, we present ...

The purpose of this study is to explore the vulnerabilities in the security protocols of UAVs and propose guidelines to improve the security and provide future research directions.

A brief review of the UAV control issues, including motion equations, various classical and advanced control approaches, as well as some challenging topics and future research directions are raised.

The use of drones, formally known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has significantly increased across a variety of applications over the past few years and the challenges and communication requirements associated with UAV-based communication systems are considered.