Use of UAVs for technical inspection of buildings within the BRAIN massive inspection platform

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more and more popular for use in a various sectors of the economy. The paper presents the results of experiments using a UAV, equipped with a high resolution digital camera, for a visual assessment of technical condition of a building with connection to a big project implemented in Barcelona that required visual data about buildings and their changes with time. Authors try to find out possibilities for the usefulness of digital images obtained from the UAV deck in concrete examples and figure out if they may be complementary to traditional ways used so far in a project called Building Research Analysis and Information Network, which is a platform for analysis to allow strategic decision-making for the maintenance and the sustainability of building stock.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

AWARE: Platform for Autonomous self-deploying and operation of Wireless sensor-actuator networks cooperating with unmanned AeRial vehiclEs

This paper presents the AWARE platform that seeks to enable the cooperation of autonomous aerial vehicles with ground wireless sensor-actuator networks comprising both static and mobile nodes carried by vehicles or people. Particularly, the paper presents the middleware, the wireless sensor network, the node deployment by means of an autonomous helicopter, and the surveillance and tracking functionalities of the platform. Furthermore, the paper presents the first general experiments of the AWARE project that took place in March 2007 with the assistance of the Seville fire brigades

Mapping and classification of ecologically sensitive marine habitats using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery and object-based image analysis (OBIA)

Nowadays, emerging technologies, such as long-range transmitters, increasingly miniaturized components for positioning, and enhanced imaging sensors, have led to an upsurge in the availability of new ecological applications for remote sensing based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), sometimes referred to as “drones”. In fact, structure-from-motion (SfM) photogrammetry coupled with imagery acquired by UAVs offers a rapid and inexpensive tool to produce high-resolution orthomosaics, giving ecologists a new way for responsive, timely, and cost-effective monitoring of ecological processes. Here, we adopted a lightweight quadcopter as an aerial survey tool and object-based image analysis (OBIA) workflow to demonstrate the strength of such methods in producing very high spatial resolution maps of sensitive marine habitats. Therefore, three different coastal environments were mapped using the autonomous flight capability of a lightweight UAV equipped with a fully stabilized consumer-grade RGB digital camera. In particular we investigated a Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadow, a rocky coast with nurseries for juvenile fish, and two sandy areas showing biogenic reefs of Sabelleria alveolata. We adopted, for the first time, UAV-based raster thematic maps of these key coastal habitats, produced after OBIA classification, as a new method for fine-scale, low-cost, and time saving characterization of sensitive marine environments which may lead to a more effective and efficient monitoring and management of natural resource

A Concept Paper on Smart River Monitoring System for Sustainability in River

River is a major source of water in Malaysia and one of the major threats to its sustainability is pollution. The existing methods for monitoring of water quality in rivers are manual monitoring and continuous monitoring. These methods are costly and less efficient. Hence, we propose a smart river monitoring system (SRMS) that uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones and low power wide area (LPWA) communication technology. The Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytic are promising techniques which provide real-time monitoring and enhances efficiency. However, due to the span of river that needs to be monitored, conventional communication technology such as Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Bluetooth are not suitable. Hence, there is the need for LPWA communication technology. We discuss the application of LPWA and UAV for sustainability of rivers in Malaysia as a case study. Preliminary results show that the use of UAV will increase the efficiency of measuring the water quality parameters compared to manual monitoring method. Also, real-time monitoring enables us to study the changes in water quality. Finally, we provide future direction in the application of UAV and LPWA for sustainability in river