The use of UAVs in areas ranging from agriculture over urban services to entertainment or simply as a hobby has rapidly grown over the last years. Regarding serious/commercial applications, UAVs have been considered in the literature, especially as mobile sensing/actuation platforms (i.e., as a delivery platform for an increasingly wide range of sensors and actuators). With regard to timely, cost-effective and very rich data acquisition, both, NEC Research as well as TNO are pursuing investigations into the use of UAVs and swarms of UAVs for scenarios where high-resolution requirements, prohibiting environments or tight time constraints render traditional approaches ineffective. In this review article, we provide a brief overview of safety and security-focused application areas that we identified as main targets for industrial and commercial projects, especially in the context of intelligent autonomous systems and autonomous/semi-autonomously operating swarms. We discuss a number of challenges related to the deployment of UAVs in general and to their deployment within the identified application areas in particular. As such, this article is meant to serve as a review and overview of the literature and the state-of-the-art, but also to offer an outlook over our possible (near-term) future work and the challenges that we will face there.

Review: Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as Mobile Sensing Platforms (MSPs) for Disaster Response, Civil Security and Public Safety

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or Drones technology has a huge potential for supporting different efficient solutions for the smart applications in our world. The applications include sma...

A survey on recent optimal techniques for securing unmanned aerial vehicles applications

In precision agriculture, activities such as selective spraying of agrochemicals are essential to maintaining high productivity and quality of agricultural products. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to perform this activity reduces soil compaction, compared to the use of heavy machinery, and helps to reduce the waste of these artificial substances through a punctual and self-regulating application. This work proposes an entire guiding system for use on UAVs (hardware and software) based on image processing techniques. The software part consists of two algorithms. The first algorithm is the Crop Row Detection which is responsible for the correct identification of the crop rows. The second algorithm is the Line Filter that is responsible for generating the driving parameters sent to the flight controller. In the field experiments performed on the proposed hardware, the algorithm achieved a detection rate of 100% of the crop rows for images with resolutions above 320 × 240. The system performance was measured in laboratory experiments and reached 31.22 FPS for images with small resolution, 320 × 240, and 1.63 FPS for the highest resolution, 1920 × 1080. The main contribution of this work is the design and development of an entire embedded guidance system composed of a hardware and software architectures. Other contributions are: the proposed filter for the image pretreatment; the filter to remove the false positive lines; and the algorithm for generating the guiding parameters based on detected crop rows.

A UAV Guidance System Using Crop Row Detection and Line Follower Algorithms

A comprehensive micro unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV/Drone) forensic framework

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with acceptable performance are becoming commercially available at an affordable cost. Due to this, the use of drones for real-time data collection is becoming common practice by individual practitioners in the areas of e.g., precision agriculture and civil defense such as fire fighting. At the same time, as UAVs become a house-hold item, a plethora of issues—which can no longer be ignored and considered niche problems—are coming of age. These range from legal and ethical questions to technical matters such as how to implement and operate a communication infrastructure to maintain control over deployed devices. With these issues being addressed, approaches that focus on enabling collectives of devices to operate semi-autonomously are also increasing in relevance. In this article we present a nature-inspired algorithm that enables a UAV-swarm to operate as a collective which provides real-time data such as video footage. The collective is able to autonomously adapt to changing resolution requirements for specific locations within the area under surveillance. Our distributed approach significantly reduces the requirements on the communication infrastructure and mitigates the computational cost otherwise incurred. In addition, if the UAVs themselves were to be equipped with even rudimentary data-analysis capabilities, the swarm could react in real-time to the data it generates and self-regulate which locations within its operational area it focuses on. The approach was tested in a swarm of 25 UAVs; we present out preliminary performance evaluation.

Nature-Inspired Drone Swarming for Real-Time Aerial Data-Collection Under Dynamic Operational Constraints

Drone technology has advanced to aid applications in field of defense, emergency, disaster relief and digital imaging Inheriting all such applications for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in low cost scale to make system for ubiquitous for all domains is the motive for our system Hence, embedding high quality video feed and controlling flight data characteristics to execute several applications Our system has been devised specifically for air navigation and hence, seamless performance of all the components placed on-board is maintained with high compactness in form factor First Person View (FPV) is provided for pilots for to achieve long distance mission execution along with image processing for accurate data analysis of flight characteristics Along with this, the telemetry data procured from Arduino integrated with sensors viz, GPS, Altimeter, IMU assists the pilot for maintaining steady flight characteristics Our system has been rigorously tested and has also been presented for Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Aero Design competition to accomplish humanitarian relief operation The low-cost general processing boards like Raspberry Pi and Arduino facilitates versatility in embedding various sensors based on requirements of the pilot Along with the on-board the telemetry system, the Ground Control System (GCS) provides first person visual aid on base station The JavaFx interface is platform independent with features like FPV video streaming in real-time, representation of UAV's altitude, orientation and position at every instance of time Moreover, the trans-receiver communication allows controlling flight characteristics from the interface, increasing the scope of applications with UAV

Aaron Samuel

Papers

Embedded video processing and data acquisition for unmanned aerial vehicle