Over the last few years, the many uses of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have captured the interest of both the scientific and the industrial communities. A typical scenario consists in the use of UAVs for surveillance or target-search missions over a wide geographical area. In this case, it is fundamental for the command center to accurately estimate and track the trajectories of the UAVs by exploiting their periodic state reports. In this work, we design an ad hoc tracking system that exploits the Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) standard for communication and an extended version of the Constant Turn Rate and Acceleration (CTRA) motion model to predict drone movements in a 3D environment. Simulation results on a publicly available dataset show that our system can reliably estimate the position and trajectory of a UAV, significantly outperforming baseline tracking approaches.
Efficiently supporting remote firmware updates in Internet of Things (IoT) devices remains a significant challenge due to the limitations of many IoT communication protocols, which often make it impractical to transmit full firmware images. Techniques such as firmware partitioning have been introduced to mitigate this issue, but they frequently fall short, especially in battery-powered systems where time and energy constraints are critical. As a result, physical maintenance interventions are still commonly required, which is costly and inconvenient in large-scale deployments. In this work, we …
As the number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the airspace grows, ensuring that the aircraft do not collide becomes vital for further technology development. In this work, we propose a new UAV Near Mid-Air collision (uNMAC) safety volume taking into account i) Airframe size, ii) Localization precision, iii) UAV speed/velocity, and iv) wireless technology capabilities. Based on uNMAC, we demonstrate that inter-UAV separation distances can be reduced by using UAV-to-UAV (U2U) communication while the safety levels remain unchanged. Moreover, this work shows that next-generation Remote ID me…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with on-board cameras are widely used for remote surveillance and video capturing applications. In remote virtual reality (VR) applications, multiple UAVs can be used to capture different partially overlapping angles of the ground target, which can be stitched together to provide 360° views. This requires coordinated formation of UAVs that is adaptive to movements of the ground target. In this paper, we propose a joint UAV formation and tracking framework to capture 360° angles of the target. The proposed framework uses a zero touch approach for automated and ad…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Institute for Systems Research（系统研究所）
We explore an end-to-end (including access and backhaul links) UAV-assisted wireless communication system, considering both uplink and downlink traffics, with the goal of supporting demand of the Ground Users (GUs) using the minimum number of UAVs. Moreover, in order to extend the operational (flight) time of UAVs, we exploit an energy-aware routing scheme. Our intention is to design and analyze the access and backhaul connectivity of a drone-assisted communication network for remote and crowded areas and disaster relief, while minimizing the resources required i.e., the number of UAVs.
UAV's capability to access remote and inaccessible areas within a quick time can be utilized for effective cyclone management. This paper presents the possible application of UAVs at different stages of cyclone mitigation. The overall system architecture necessary for preparedness, rescue operation, resource allocation, and damage assessment using UAVs during cyclones is described. Although general commercial UAVs are reported to be used in cyclone operations, UAV systems should be planned specifically for cyclone operations to improve efficiency. Here, the specification required for effective…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a convenient choice for carrying mobile base stations to rapidly setup communication services for ground users. Unlike terrestrial networks, UAVs do not have fiber optic back-haul connectivity except when they are tethered to the ground, which restricts their mobility. In the absence of back-haul, e.g., in remote areas, emergency situations, or in battlefields, there is a need to ensure connectivity among UAVs in addition to coverage of ground users for creating local area networks. This paper provides a distributed and dynamic approach for UAV formation-bas…
This paper presents fast procedures for thermal infrared remote sensing in dark, GPS-denied environments, such as those found in industrial plants such as in High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) converter stations. These procedures are based on the combination of the depth estimation obtained from either a 1-Dimensional LIDAR laser or a 2-Dimensional Hokuyo laser or a 3D MultiSense SLB laser sensor and the visible and thermal cameras from a FLIR Duo R dual-sensor thermal camera. The combination of these sensors/cameras is suitable to be mounted on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and/or robots in…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm has emerged as a promising novel paradigm to achieve better coverage and higher capacity for future wireless network by exploiting the more favorable line-of-sight (LoS) propagation. To reap the potential gains of UAV swarm, the remote control signal sent by ground control unit (GCU) is essential, whereas the control signal quality are susceptible in practice due to the effect of the adjacent channel interference (ACI) and the external interference (EI) from radiation sources distributed across the region. To tackle these challenges, this paper considers pri…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being successfully used to deliver communication services in applications such as extending the coverage of 5G cellular networks in remote areas, emergency situations, and enhancing the service quality in regions of dense user populations. While optimized placement solutions have been proposed in literature for ensuring quality of service (QoS) of users, they may not be ideal in highly mobile, autonomous, and diverse network scenarios. This paper proposes a proactive and resilient framework for distributed and dynamic orchestration of UAV small cells to prov…
Trajectory Tracking for UAVs: An Interpolating Control Approach
New Technologies for the Information Society Research Center（信息技术新技术研究中心）；Department of Cybernetics（控制论系）；Faculty of Applied Sciences（应用科学学院）；University of West Bohemia（西波希米亚大学）
A smart grid is a widely distributed engineering system with overhead transmission lines. Physical damage to these power lines, from natural calamities or technical failures, will disrupt the functional integrity of the grid. To ensure the continuation of the grid's operational flow when those phenomena happen, the grid operator must immediately take steps to nullify the impacts and repair the problems, even if those occur in hardly-reachable remote areas. Emerging unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) show great potential to replace traditional human patrols for regularly monitoring critical situat…
Personalized Federated Learning by Energy-Efficient UAV Communications
Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University（计算机科学系，北卡罗来纳州立大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts（电气与计算机工程系，马萨诸塞大学）
Spatio-Temporal Attention Enhanced Multi-Agent DRL for UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks with Limited Communications
School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学智能系统工程学院深圳校区）；Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai)（广东海洋工程科学实验室（珠海））；Department of Equipment Management and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Engineering, Air Force Engineering University（空军工程大学装备管理与无人机工程系）；School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（江西财经大学计算机与人工智能学院）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机与数据科学学院）
