Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges
New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）；Universiti Tenaga Nasional（国家能源大学）；Western Michigan University（西密歇根大学）；Tafila Technical University（塔菲拉技术大学）；University of Idaho（爱达荷大学）
Hazim Shakhatreh, Ahmad Sawalmeh, Ala Al-Fuqaha, Zuochao Dou, Eyad Almaita, Issa Khalil, Noor Shamsiah Othman, Abdallah Khreishah, Mohsen Guizani
备注：
arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1602.03602, arXiv:1704.04813 by other authors
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly across many civil application domains including real-time monitoring, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. Smart UAVs are the next big revolution in UAV technology promising to provide new opportunities in different applications, especially in civil infrastructure in terms of reduced risks and lower cost. Civil infrastructure is expected to dominate the more that $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. In this survey, we present UAV civil applications and their challenges. We also discuss current research trends and provide future insights for potential UAV uses. Furthermore, we present the key challenges for UAV civil applications, including: charging challenges, collision avoidance and swarming challenges, and networking and security related challenges. Based on our review of the recent literature, we discuss open research challenges and draw high-level insights on how these challenges might be approached.
New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）；University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) are attaining more and more maneuverability and sensory ability as a promising teleoperation platform for intelligent interaction with the environments. This work presents a novel 5-degree-of-freedom (DoF) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) cyber-physical system for aerial manipulation. This UAV's body is capable of exerting powerful propulsion force in the longitudinal direction, decoupling the translational dynamics and the rotational dynamics on the longitudinal plane. A high-level impedance control law is proposed to drive the vehicle for trajectory tracking and i…
Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）；University of Seville（塞维利亚大学）
This letter describes a method for autonomous aerial cinematography with distributed lighting by a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Although camera-carrying multi-rotor helicopters have become commonplace in cinematography, their usage is limited to scenarios with sufficient natural light or of lighting provided by static artificial lights. We propose to use a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles as a tool for filming a target under illumination from various directions, which is one of the fundamental techniques of traditional cinematography. We decompose the multi-UAV trajectory opti…
Instituto de Telecomunicações（电信研究所）；ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa（里斯本大学学院）；CTS-UNINOVA
This paper presents a monocular vision system susceptible of being installed in unmanned small and medium-sized aerial vehicles built to perform missions in forest environments (e.g., search and rescue). The proposed system extends a previous monocular-based technique for trail detection and tracking so as to take into account volumetric data acquired from a Visual SLAM algorithm and, as a result, to increase its sturdiness upon challenging trails. The experimental results, obtained via a set of 12 videos recorded with a camera installed in a tele-operated, unmanned small-sized aerial vehicle,…
Filming sport videos from an aerial view has always been a hard and an expensive task to achieve, especially in sports that require a wide open area for its normal development or the ones that put in danger human safety. Recently, a new solution arose for aerial filming based on the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which is substantially cheaper than traditional aerial filming solutions that require conventional aircrafts like helicopters or complex structures for wide mobility. In this paper, we describe the design process followed for building a customized UAV suitable for sports aeri…
School of Electric Engineering and Informatics Institut Teknologi Bandung（万隆理工学院电气工程与信息学院）
This research will proposed a new kind of relatively low cost autonomous UAV that will enable farmers to make just in time mosaics of aerial photo of their crop. These mosaics of aerial photo should be able to be produced with relatively low cost and within the 24 hours of acquisition constraint. The autonomous UAV will be equipped with payload management system specifically developed for rapid aerial mapping. As mentioned before turn around time is the key factor, so accuracy is not the main focus (not orthorectified aerial mapping). This system will also be equipped with special software to …
Electronics Technology, Systems and Automation Engineering Department at the University of Cantabria（坎塔布里亚大学电子技术、系统与自动化工程系）
We consider the problem of designing scalable and portable controllers for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to reach time-varying formations as quickly as possible. This brief confirms that deep reinforcement learning can be used in a multi-agent fashion to drive UAVs to reach any formation while taking into account optimality and portability. We use a deep neural network to estimate how good a state is, so the agent can choose actions accordingly. The system is tested with different non-high-dimensional sensory inputs without any change in the neural network architecture, algorithm or hyperpar…
Yonsei University（延世大学）；Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute（电子通信研究院）
In this study, reinforcement learning was applied to learning two-dimensional path planning including obstacle avoidance by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in an indoor environment. The task assigned to the UAV was to reach the goal position in the shortest amount of time without colliding with any obstacles. Reinforcement learning was performed in a virtual environment created using Gazebo, a virtual environment simulator, to reduce the learning time and cost. Curriculum learning, which consists of two stages was performed for more efficient learning. As a result of learning with two reward mod…
In this paper we focus on the evaluation of contextual autonomy for robots. More specifically, we propose a fuzzy framework for calculating the autonomy score for a small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) for performing a task while considering task complexity and environmental factors. Our framework is a cascaded Fuzzy Inference System (cFIS) composed of combination of three FIS which represent different contextual autonomy capabilities. We performed several experiments to test our framework in various contexts, such as endurance time, navigation, take off/land, and room clearing, with seven dif…
Safely integrating unmanned aerial vehicles into civil airspace is contingent upon development of a trustworthy collision avoidance system. This paper proposes an approach whereby a parameterized resolution logic that is considered trusted for a given range of its parameters is adaptively tuned online. Specifically, to address the potential conservatism of the resolution logic with static parameters, we present a dynamic programming approach for adapting the parameters dynamically based on the encounter state. We compute the adaptation policy offline using a simulation-based approximate dynami…
University of Nevada（内华达大学）；NASA Ames Research Center（NASA艾姆斯研究中心）
Wildland fire fighting is a very dangerous job, and the lack of information of the fire front is one of main reasons that causes many accidents. Using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to cover wildfire is promising because it can replace human in hazardous fire tracking and save operation costs significantly. In this paper we propose a distributed control framework designed for a team of UAVs that can closely monitor a wildfire in open space, and precisely track its development. The UAV team, designed for flexible deployment, can effectively avoid in-flight collision as well as cooperate well wit…
The rise of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and their increasing use in the cinema industry calls for the creation of dedicated tools. Though there is a range of techniques to automatically control drones for a variety of applications, none have considered the problem of producing cinematographic camera motion in real-time for shooting purposes. In this paper we present our approach to UAV navigation for autonomous cinematography. The contributions of this research are twofold: (i) we adapt virtual camera control techniques to UAV navigation; (ii) we introduce a drone-independent platform for high-le…
University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；Air Force Research Laboratory（空军研究实验室）
We present a novel control strategy for a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to autonomously achieve a desired formation using only visual feedback provided by the UAV's onboard cameras. This effectively eliminates the need for global position measurements. The proposed pipeline is fully distributed and encompasses a collision avoidance scheme. In our approach, each UAV extracts feature points from captured images and communicates their pixel coordinates and descriptors among its neighbors. These feature points are used in our novel pose estimation algorithm, QuEst, to localize the neighb…
Yonsei University（延世大学）；Korea Aerospace Research Institute（韩国航空宇宙研究院）
Multi-agent reinforcement learning was performed in this study for indoor path planning of two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Each UAV performed the task of moving as fast as possible from a randomly paired initial position to a goal position in an environment with obstacles. To minimize training time and prevent the damage of UAVs, learning was performed by simulation. Considering the non-stationary characteristics of the multi-agent environment wherein the optimal behavior varies based on the actions of other agents, the action of the other UAV was also included in the state space of each …
A Reflectance Transformation Imaging technique (RTI) realized by multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with a focus on deployment in difficult to access buildings is presented in this letter. RTI is a computational photographic method that captures a surface shape and color of a subject and enables its interactive re-lighting from any direction in a software viewer, revealing details that are not visible with the naked eye. The input of RTI is a set of images captured by a static camera, each one under illumination from a different known direction. We present an innovative approach apply…
This paper addresses the issues of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) indoor navigation, specifically in areas where GPS and magnetometer sensor measurements are unavailable or unreliable. The proposed solution is to use an error state extended Kalman filter (ES -EKF) in the context of multi-sensor fusion. Its implementation is adapted to fuse measurements from multiple sensor sources and the state model is extended to account for sensor drift and possible calibration inaccuracies. Experimental validation is performed by fusing IMU data obtained from the PixHawk 2.1 flight controller with pose meas…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；NASA Ames Research Center（美国国家航空航天局艾姆斯研究中心）
With the number of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) in the national airspace projected to increase in the next few years, there is growing interest in a traffic management system capable of handling the demands of this aviation sector. It is expected that such a system will involve trajectory prediction, uncertainty propagation, and path planning algorithms. In this work, we use linear covariance propagation in combination with a quadratic programming-based collision detection algorithm to rapidly validate declared flight plans. Additionally, these algorithms are combined with a Dynamic,…
University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Metropolitan Fire Brigade（大都会消防局）
An autonomous indoor aerial vehicle requires reliable simul- taneous localization and mapping (SLAM), accurate flight control, and robust path planning for navigation. This paper presents a system level combination of these existing technologies for 2D navigation. An Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) called URSA (Unmanned Recon and Safety Aircraft) that can autonomously flight and mapping indoors environments with an accuracy of 2 cm was developed. Performance in indoor environments was assessed in terms of mapping and navigation precision.
University of Nevada, Reno（内华达大学里诺分校）；NASA Ames Research Center（美国国家航空航天局艾姆斯研究中心）
Wild-land fire fighting is a hazardous job. A key task for firefighters is to observe the "fire front" to chart the progress of the fire and areas that will likely spread next. Lack of information of the fire front causes many accidents. Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to cover wildfire is promising because it can replace humans in hazardous fire tracking and significantly reduce operation costs. In this paper we propose a distributed control framework designed for a team of UAVs that can closely monitor a wildfire in open space, and precisely track its development. The UAV team, designe…
Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology（锡金马尼帕尔理工学院）；BIT Mesra（梅斯拉理工学院）
According to the American Heritage Dictionary [1],Robotics is the science or study of the technology associated with the design, fabrication, theory, and application of Robots. The term Hoverbot is also often used to refer to sophisticated mechanical devices that are remotely controlled by human beings even though these devices are not autonomous. This paper describes a remotely controlled hoverbot by installing a transmitter and receiver on both sides that is the control computer (PC) and the hoverbot respectively. Data is transmitted as signal or instruction via a infrastructure network whic…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely applied in civil applications, such as disaster relief, agriculture and cargo transportation, etc. With the massive number of UAV flight activities, the anti-collision technologies aiming to avoid the collisions between UAVs and other objects have attracted much attention. The anti-collision technologies are of vital importance to guarantee the survivability and safety of UAVs. In this article, a comprehensive survey on UAV anti-collision technologies is presented. We firstly introduce laws and regulations on UAV safety which prevent collision at the …
The vision of unmanned aerial vehicles is very significant for UAV-related applications such as search and rescue, landing on a moving platform, etc. In this work, we have developed an integrated system for the UAV landing on the moving platform, and the UAV object detection with tracking in the complicated environment. Firstly, we have proposed a robust LoG-based deep neural network for object detection and tracking, which has great advantages in robustness to object scale and illuminations compared with typical deep network-based approaches. Then, we have also improved based on the original …
During floods, reaching survivors in the shortest possible time is a priority for rescue teams. Given their ability to explore difficult terrain in short spans of time, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become an increasingly valuable aid to search and rescue operations. Traditionally, UAVs utilize exhaustive lawnmower exploration patterns to locate stranded survivors, without any information regarding the survivor's whereabouts. In real life disaster scenarios however, on-ground observers provide valuable information to the rescue effort, such as the survivor's last known location and head…
Spiking Neural Network Actor-Critic Proximal Policy Optimization Control for Autonomous UAV Navigation Through Constrained Openings in Civil Infrastructure and Buildings
Alma Mater Europaea University（欧洲阿尔马马特大学）；AGH University of Krakow（克拉科夫AGH科技大学）
This paper presents a visual tracking system that is capable or running real time on-board a small UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). The tracking system is computationally efficient and invariant to lighting changes and rotation of the object or the camera. Detection and tracking is autonomously carried out on the payload computer and there are two different methods for creation of the image patches. The first method starts detecting and tracking using a stored image patch created prior to flight with previous flight data. The second method allows the operator on the ground to select the interest…
Marquette University（马凯特大学）；USDA-ARS-AFRS（美国农业部农业研究局阿巴拉契亚水果研究站）；University of Missouri（密苏里大学）
A key aspect to controlling and reducing the effects invasive insect species have on agriculture is to obtain knowledge about the migration patterns of these species. Current state-of-the-art methods of studying these migration patterns involve a mark-release-recapture technique, in which insects are released after being marked and researchers attempt to recapture them later. However, this approach involves a human researcher manually searching for these insects in large fields and results in very low recapture rates. In this paper, we propose an automated system for detecting released insects…
Technological University of Uruguay（乌拉圭理工大学）；Federal University of Rio Grande（里奥格兰德联邦大学）；Federal University of Santa Maria（圣玛丽亚联邦大学）
This paper presents a novel deep reinforcement learning-based system for 3D mapless navigation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Instead of using a image-based sensing approach, we propose a simple learning system that uses only a few sparse range data from a distance sensor to train a learning agent. We based our approaches on two state-of-art double critic Deep-RL models: Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). We show that our two approaches manage to outperform an approach based on the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) technique and the…
Adaptive RISE Control for Dual-Arm Unmanned Aerial Manipulator Systems with Deep Neural Networks
Nankai University（南开大学）；College of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能学院）；Institute of Robotics and Automatic Information System（机器人与自动信息系统研究所）；Engineering Research Center of Trusted Behavior Intelligence, Ministry of Education（教育部可信行为智能工程研究中心）
In literature, several approaches are trying to make the UAVs fly autonomously i.e., by extracting perspective cues such as straight lines. However, it is only available in well-defined human made environments, in addition to many other cues which require enough texture information. Our main target is to detect and avoid frontal obstacles from a monocular camera using a quad rotor Ar.Drone 2 by exploiting optical flow as a motion parallax, the drone is permitted to fly at a speed of 1 m/s and an altitude ranging from 1 to 4 meters above the ground level. In general, detecting and avoiding fron…
The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）
In recent years, Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) have been extensively deployed for maritime applications. However, USV has a limited detection range with sensor installed at the same elevation with the targets. In this research, we propose a cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicle - Unmanned Surface Vehicle (UAV-USV) platform to improve the detection range of USV. A floatable and waterproof UAV is designed and 3D printed, which allows it to land on the sea. A catamaran USV and landing platform are also developed. To land UAV on the USV precisely in various lighting conditions, IR beacon detector …
This paper presents an algorithm and the implementation of a motor schema to aid the visual localization subsystem of the ongoing EMILY project at Texas A and M University. The EMILY project aims to team an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to augment the search and rescue of marine casualties during an emergency response phase. The USV is designed to serve as a flotation device once it reaches the victims. A live video feed from the UAV is provided to the casuality responders giving them a visual estimate of the USVs orientation and position to help with its…
KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence（KIOS卓越研究与创新中心）；University of Cyprus（塞浦路斯大学）
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), equipped with camera sensors can facilitate enhanced situational awareness for many emergency response and disaster management applications since they are capable of operating in remote and difficult to access areas. In addition, by utilizing an embedded platform and deep learning UAVs can autonomously monitor a disaster stricken area, analyze the image in real-time and alert in the presence of various calamities such as collapsed buildings, flood, or fire in order to faster mitigate their effects on the environment and on human population. To this end, this pa…
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）
We propose a context-sensitive grammar for the systematic exploration of the design space of the topology of 3D robots, particularly unmanned aerial vehicles. It defines production rules for adding components to an incomplete design topology modeled over a 3D grid. The rules are local. The grammar is simple, yet capable of modeling most existing UAVs as well as novel ones. It can be easily generalized to other robotic platforms. It can be thought of as a building block for any design exploration and optimization algorithm.
Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) is a technology that is almost four decades old and it was developed solely for the purpose of developing and enhancing the impact of neuroprosthetics. However, in the recent times, with the commercialization of non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets, the technology has seen a wide variety of applications like home automation, wheelchair control, vehicle steering etc. One of the latest developed applications is the mind-controlled quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. These applications, how- ever, do not require a very high-speed response and give satis…
School of Integrated Technology, Yonsei University（延世大学整合技术学院）；Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute（电子通信研究院）
In this study, we applied reinforcement learning based on the proximal policy optimization algorithm to perform motion planning for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in an open space with static obstacles. The application of reinforcement learning through a real UAV has several limitations such as time and cost; thus, we used the Gazebo simulator to train a virtual quadrotor UAV in a virtual environment. As the reinforcement learning progressed, the mean reward and goal rate of the model were increased. Furthermore, the test of the trained model shows that the UAV reaches the goal with an 81% g…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multiple complementary sensors have tremendous potential for fast autonomous or remote-controlled semantic scene analysis, e.g., for disaster examination. In this work, we propose a UAV system for real-time semantic inference and fusion of multiple sensor modalities. Semantic segmentation of LiDAR scans and RGB images, as well as object detection on RGB and thermal images, run online onboard the UAV computer using lightweight CNN architectures and embedded inference accelerators. We follow a late fusion approach where semantic information from mult…
Attitude estimation for small, low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles is often achieved using a relatively simple complementary filter that combines onboard accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometer sensing. This paper explores the limits of performance of such attitude estimation, with a focus on performance in highly dynamic maneuvers. The complementary filter is derived along with the extended Kalman filter and unscented Kalman filter to evaluate the potential performance gains when using a more sophisticated estimator. Simulations are presented that compare performance across a range of test…
Deloitte LLP（德勤有限责任公司）；Royal Holloway University of London（伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院）
The anticipated widespread use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) raises significant safety and security concerns, including trespassing in restricted areas, colliding with other UAVs, and disrupting high-traffic airspaces. To mitigate these risks, geofences have been proposed as one line of defence, which limit UAVs from flying into the perimeters of other UAVs and restricted locations. In this paper, we address the concern that existing geometric geofencing algorithms lack accuracy during the calculation of complex geofences, particularly in dynamic urban environments. We propose a new algor…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with mounted cameras have the advantage of capturing aerial (bird-view) images. The availability of aerial visual data and the recent advances in object detection algorithms led the computer vision community to focus on object detection tasks on aerial images. As a result of this, several aerial datasets have been introduced, including visual data with object annotations. UAVs are used solely as flying-cameras in these datasets, discarding different data types regarding the flight (e.g., time, location, internal sensors). In this work, we propose a multi-purpose…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Defence Science and Technology Group（国防科学与技术集团）
Accurate localisation of unmanned aerial vehicles is vital for the next generation of automation tasks. This paper proposes a minimum energy filter for velocity-aided pose estimation on the extended special Euclidean group. The approach taken exploits the Lie-group symmetry of the problem to combine Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensor output with landmark measurements into a robust and high performance state estimate. We propose an asynchronous discrete-time implementation to fuse high bandwidth IMU with low bandwidth discrete-time landmark measurements typical of real-world scenarios. The …
One of the biggest challenges is to determine the deployment and navigation of the drones to benefit the most for different applications. Many research questions have been raised about this topic. For example, drone-enabled wildlife monitoring has received much attention in recent years. Unfortunately, this approach results in significant disturbance to different species of wild animals. Moreover, with the capability of rapidly moving communication supply towards demand when required, the drone equipped with a base station, i.e., drone-cell, is becoming a promising solution for providing cellu…
Czech Institute for Informatics, Robotics, and Cybernetics（捷克信息学、机器人学与控制论研究所）；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克技术大学）
This paper describes the design and implementation of a ground-related odometry sensor suitable for micro aerial vehicles. The sensor is based on a ground-facing camera and a single-board Linux-based embedded computer with a multimedia System on a Chip (SoC). The SoC features a hardware video encoder which is used to estimate the optical flow online. The optical flow is then used in combination with a distance sensor to estimate the vehicle's velocity. The proposed sensor is compared to a similar existing solution and evaluated in both indoor and outdoor environments.
There is an increasing demand for using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), known as drones, in different applications such as packages delivery, traffic monitoring, search and rescue operations, and military combat engagements. In all of these applications, the UAV is used to navigate the environment autonomously - without human interaction, perform specific tasks and avoid obstacles. Autonomous UAV navigation is commonly accomplished using Reinforcement Learning (RL), where agents act as experts in a domain to navigate the environment while avoiding obstacles. Understanding the navigation environ…
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande - FURG（里奥格兰德联邦大学（FURG））；Universidade Federal de Santa Maria - UFSM（圣玛丽亚联邦大学（UFSM））；Technological University of Uruguay（乌拉圭技术大学）
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has presented an impressive performance in video games through raw pixel imaging and continuous control tasks. However, RL performs poorly with high-dimensional observations such as raw pixel images. It is generally accepted that physical state-based RL policies such as laser sensor measurements give a more sample-efficient result than learning by pixels. This work presents a new approach that extracts information from a depth map estimation to teach an RL agent to perform the mapless navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). We propose the Depth-Imaged Contrasti…
This paper presents a data-driven optimal control policy for a micro flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle. First, a set of optimal trajectories are computed off-line based on a geometric formulation of dynamics that captures the nonlinear coupling between the large angle flapping motion and the quasi-steady aerodynamics. Then, it is transformed into a feedback control system according to the framework of imitation learning. In particular, an additional constraint is incorporated through the learning process to enhance the stability properties of the resulting controlled dynamics. Compared wit…
We study the problem of planning a tour for an energy-limited Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to visit a set of sites in the least amount of time. We envision scenarios where the UAV can be recharged along the way either by landing on stationary recharging stations or on Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) acting as mobile recharging stations. This leads to a new variant of the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) with mobile recharging stations. We present an algorithm that finds not only the order in which to visit the sites but also when and where to land on the charging stations to recharge. Our …
In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in both practical and research applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). According to the literature, there is a need in this area to develop a more refined model of UAV system architecture, in other words, a conceptual model that defines the system s structure and behavior. The existing models mostly are fractional and do not account for the entire important dynamic attributes. Progress in this area could reduce ambiguity and increase reliability in the design of such systems. This paper aims to advance the modeling of UAV system arch…
Research, Technology and Innovation Network (RTIN), The American College of Greece（美国希腊学院研究、技术与创新网络（RTIN））；Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）
In this work, we study the trade-off between the reliability and the investment cost of an unmanned aerial system (UAS) consisting of a set of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) carrying radio access nodes, called portable access points (PAPs)), deployed to serve a set of ground nodes (GNs). Using the proposed algorithm, a given geographical region is equivalently represented as a set of circular regions, where each circle represents the coverage region of a PAP. Then, the steady-state availability of the UAS is analytically derived by modelling it as a continuous time birth-death Markov decision…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multiple complementary sensors have tremendous potential for fast autonomous or remote-controlled semantic scene analysis, e.g., for disaster examination. Here, we propose a UAV system for real-time semantic inference and fusion of multiple sensor modalities. Semantic segmentation of LiDAR scans and RGB images, as well as object detection on RGB and thermal images, run online onboard the UAV computer using lightweight CNN architectures and embedded inference accelerators. We follow a late fusion approach where semantic information from multiple sen…
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande (FURG)（里奥格兰德联邦大学（FURG））；Universidad Tecnológica del Uruguay (UTEC)（乌拉圭技术大学（UTEC））
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have been standing out due to the wide range of applications in which they can be used autonomously. However, they need intelligent systems capable of providing a greater understanding of what they perceive to perform several tasks. They become more challenging in complex environments since there is a need to perceive the environment and act under environmental uncertainties to make a decision. In this context, a system that uses active perception can improve performance by seeking the best next view through the recognition of targets while displacement occurs. T…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
While deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved unprecedented successes in a range of challenging problems, their applicability has been mainly limited to simulation or game domains due to the high sample complexity of the trial-and-error learning process. However, real-world robotic applications often need a data-efficient learning process with safety-critical constraints. In this paper, we consider the challenging problem of learning unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control for tracking a moving target. To acquire a strategy that combines perception and control, we represent the po…
Universidad Central de Chile（智利中央大学）；Universidade de Pernambuco（伯南布哥大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）
Currently, unmanned aerial vehicles, such as drones, are becoming a part of our lives and reaching out to many areas of society, including the industrialized world. A common alternative to control the movements and actions of the drone is through unwired tactile interfaces, for which different remote control devices can be found. However, control through such devices is not a natural, human-like communication interface, which sometimes is difficult to master for some users. In this work, we present a domain-based speech recognition architecture to effectively control an unmanned aerial vehicle…
In this work, we study vulnerability of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to stealthy attacks on perception-based control. To guide our analysis, we consider two specific missions: ($i$) ground vehicle tracking (GVT), and ($ii$) vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) of a quadcopter on a moving ground vehicle. Specifically, we introduce a method to consistently attack both the sensors measurements and camera images over time, in order to cause control performance degradation (e.g., by failing the mission) while remaining stealthy (i.e., undetected by the deployed anomaly detector). Unlike existing…
Proper path planning is the first step of robust and efficient autonomous navigation for mobile robots. Meanwhile, it is still challenging for robots to work in a complex environment without complete prior information. This paper presents an extension to the A* search algorithm and its variants to make the path planning stable with less computational burden while handling long-distance tasks. The implemented algorithm is capable of online searching for a collision-free and smooth path when heading to the defined goal position. This paper deploys the algorithm on the autonomous drone platform a…
This work presents an online learning-based control method for improved trajectory tracking of unmanned aerial vehicles using both deep learning and expert knowledge. The proposed method does not require the exact model of the system to be controlled, and it is robust against variations in system dynamics as well as operational uncertainties. The learning is divided into two phases: offline (pre-)training and online (post-)training. In the former, a conventional controller performs a set of trajectories and, based on the input-output dataset, the deep neural network (DNN)-based controller is t…
