An Energy Efficient Data Collection Using Multiple UAVs in Wireless Sensor Network: A Survey Study

   اليوم، مع التقدم العلمي والتكنولوجي في الروبوتات، والذكاء الاصطناعي، والسيطرة والحواسيب، المركبات البرية والجوية والبحرية قد تم الاهتمام بها. كما تم تحسين الطائرات بدون طيار (UAVs) بشكل كبير وهي مفيدة جدا للعديد من التطبيقات الهامة في الأعمال التجارية والبيئة الحضرية والعسكرية. أحد أهم استخدامات الطائرات بدون طيار في شبكات الاستشعار اللاسلكية (WSNs)  التي لديها طاقة منخفضة وقد لا تكون قادرة على الاتصال في مناطق واسعة. في هذه الحالة ، يمكن أن توفر الطائرة بدون طيار وسيلة لجمع بيانات WSN من جهاز واحد ونقلها إلى المستلم المقصود تركز هذه المقالة على مجال البحث في التطبيقات العملية للطائرات بدون طيار كجامع متنقل لشبكات الاستشعار اللاسلكية. أولا التحقيقات حول الطائرات بدون طيار المقترحة تم دراستها ومقارنة نقاط ضعفها مع بعضها البعض. وكذلك التحديات التقنية لتطبيقات الطائرات بدون طيار في شبكة الاستشعار اللاسلكية تم استكشافها.Today, with scientific and technological advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, control and computers, land, air, and sea vehicles, they have been considered. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have also significantly improved and are very useful for many important applications in the business, urban and military environment. One of the important uses of UAVs in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is that devices with low energy and may not be able to communicate in large areas. Nevertheless, a UAV can provide a tool for collecting the data of WSN from one device and transmitting it to another device. This article focuses on the field of research on practical applications of UAVs as mobile collectors for wireless sensor networks. First, the investigations of the proposed UAV were studied and compared their weaknesses with each other. Then, the technical challenges of the applications of UAVs in the wireless sensor network were explored

Optimizing the Placement of Multiple UAV--LiDAR Units Under Road Priority and Resolution Requirements

Real-time road traffic information is crucial for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) applications, like traffic navigation or emergency response management, but acquiring such data is tremendously challenging in practice because of the high costs and inefficient placement of sensors. Some modern ITS applications contribute to this problem by equipping vehicles with multiple light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors, which are expensive and gather data inefficiently; one solution that avoids vehicle-mounted LiDAR acquisition has been to install elevated LiDAR instruments along roadways, but this approach remains unrefined. The eventual development of sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication will enable new, creative solutions to solve these challenges. One new solution is to deploy multiple multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) outfitted with LiDAR sensors (ULiDs) to acquire data remotely. These ULiDs can capture accurate and real-time road traffic information for ITS applications while maximizing the capabilities of LiDAR sensors, which in turn reduces the number of sensors required. Accordingly, this thesis aims to find the optimal 3D placement of multiple ULiDs to maximize road coverage efficiency for ITS purposes. The formulated optimization problem is constrained by unique ULiD specifications, including field-of-view (FoV), point cloud resolution, geographic information system location, and road segment coverage priorities. A computational intelligent algorithm based on particle swarm optimization is proposed to solve the designed optimization problem. Furthermore, this thesis illustrates the benefits of using the proposed algorithm over existing baselines --Abstract, p. ii

Scan matching by cross-correlation and differential evolution

Scan matching is an important task, solved in the context of many high-level problems including pose estimation, indoor localization, simultaneous localization and mapping and others. Methods that are accurate and adaptive and at the same time computationally efficient are required to enable location-based services in autonomous mobile devices. Such devices usually have a wide range of high-resolution sensors but only a limited processing power and constrained energy supply. This work introduces a novel high-level scan matching strategy that uses a combination of two advanced algorithms recently used in this field: cross-correlation and differential evolution. The cross-correlation between two laser range scans is used as an efficient measure of scan alignment and the differential evolution algorithm is used to search for the parameters of a transformation that aligns the scans. The proposed method was experimentally validated and showed good ability to match laser range scans taken shortly after each other and an excellent ability to match laser range scans taken with longer time intervals between them.Web of Science88art. no. 85

Autonomous Drone Landings on an Unmanned Marine Vehicle using Deep Reinforcement Learning

This thesis describes with the integration of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV, also commonly known as drone) in a single Multi-Agent System (MAS). In marine robotics, the advantage offered by a MAS consists of exploiting the key features of a single robot to compensate for the shortcomings in the other. In this way, a USV can serve as the landing platform to alleviate the need for a UAV to be airborne for long periods time, whilst the latter can increase the overall environmental awareness thanks to the possibility to cover large portions of the prevailing environment with a camera (or more than one) mounted on it. There are numerous potential applications in which this system can be used, such as deployment in search and rescue missions, water and coastal monitoring, and reconnaissance and force protection, to name but a few. The theory developed is of a general nature. The landing manoeuvre has been accomplished mainly identifying, through artificial vision techniques, a fiducial marker placed on a flat surface serving as a landing platform. The raison d'etre for the thesis was to propose a new solution for autonomous landing that relies solely on onboard sensors and with minimum or no communications between the vehicles. To this end, initial work solved the problem while using only data from the cameras mounted on the in-flight drone. In the situation in which the tracking of the marker is interrupted, the current position of the USV is estimated and integrated into the control commands. The limitations of classic control theory used in this approached suggested the need for a new solution that empowered the flexibility of intelligent methods, such as fuzzy logic or artificial neural networks. The recent achievements obtained by deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques in end-to-end control in playing the Atari video-games suite represented a fascinating while challenging new way to see and address the landing problem. Therefore, novel architectures were designed for approximating the action-value function of a Q-learning algorithm and used to map raw input observation to high-level navigation actions. In this way, the UAV learnt how to land from high latitude without any human supervision, using only low-resolution grey-scale images and with a level of accuracy and robustness. Both the approaches have been implemented on a simulated test-bed based on Gazebo simulator and the model of the Parrot AR-Drone. The solution based on DRL was further verified experimentally using the Parrot Bebop 2 in a series of trials. The outcomes demonstrate that both these innovative methods are both feasible and practicable, not only in an outdoor marine scenario but also in indoor ones as well

Building an Aerial-Ground Robotics System for Precision Farming: An Adaptable Solution

[No abstract available

Cooperative and Distributed Algorithms for Dynamic Fire Coverage using a Team of UAVs

Recent large wildfires in the United States and subsequent damage that they have caused have increased the importance of wildfire monitoring and tracking. However, human monitoring on the ground or in the air may be too dangerous and therefore, there needs to be alternatives to monitoring wildfires. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are currently being considered and used for applications such as reconnaissance, surveying, and monitoring in the spatial-time domain because they can be deployed in teams remotely to gather information and minimize the harm and risk to human operators. UAVs have been previously used in this problem domain to track and monitor wildfires with approaches such as potential fields and reinforcement learning. In this thesis, we aim to look at a team of UAVs, in a distributed approach, over an area to maximize the sensor coverage in dynamic wildfire environments and minimize the energy consumption of deployed UAVs in a network. The work implements and compares an implementation of Deb's NSGA-II to optimize potential fields, Experience Replay with Q-learning, a Deep Q-Network (DQN), and a Deep Q-Network with a state estimator (autoencoder) to track and cover wildfires. The application of this work is a not a final suggestion or an absolute solution for wildfire monitoring and tracking but instead compares the methods to declare the most promising method for future work and research

Study of artificial intelligence and computer vision methods for tracking transmission lines with the AID of UAVs

Currently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been used in the most diverse applications in both the civil and military sectors. In the civil sector, aerial inspection services have been gaining a lot of attention, especially in the case of inspections of high voltage electrical systems transmission lines. This type of inspection involves a helicopter carrying three or more people (technicians, pilot, etc.) flying over the transmission line along its entire length which is a dangerous service especially due to the proximity of the transmission line and possible environmental conditions (wind gusts, for example). In this context, the use of UAVs has shown considerable interest due to their low cost and safety for transmission line inspection technicians. This work presents research results related to the application of UAVs for transmission lines inspection, autonomously, allowing the identification of invasions of the transmission line area as well as possible defects in components (cables, insulators, connection, etc.) through the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for fault detection and identification. This thesis proposes the development of an autonomous system to track power transmission lines using UAVs efficiently and with low implementation and operation costs, based exclusively on rea-time image processing that identifies the structure of the towers and transmission lines durin the flight and controls the aircraft´s movements, guiding it along the closest possible path. A sumary of the work developed will be presented in the next sections.Atualmente, os Veículos Aéreos Não Tripulados – VANTs têm sido utilizados nas mais diversas aplicações tanto no setor civil quanto militar. No setor civil, os serviços de inspeção aérea vêm ganhando bastante atenção, principalmente no caso de inspeções de linhas de transmissão de sistemas elétricos de alta tensão. Este tipo de inspeção envolve um helicóptero transportando três ou mais pessoas (técnicos, pilotos, etc.) sobrevoando a linha de transmissão em toda a sua extensão, o que constitui um serviço perigoso principalmente pela proximidade da linha de transmissão e possíveis condições ambientais (rajadas de vento, por exemplo). Neste contexto, a utilização de VANTs tem demonstrado considerável interesse devido ao seu baixo custo e segurança para técnicos de inspeção de linhas de transmissão. Este trabalho apresenta resultados de pesquisas relacionadas à aplicação de VANTs para inspeção de linhas de transmissão, de forma autônoma, permitindo a identificação de invasões da área da linha de transmissão bem como possíveis defeitos em componentes (cabos, isoladores, conexões, etc.) através do uso de Convolucional. Redes Neurais - CNN para detecção e identificação de falhas. Esta tese propõe o desenvolvimento de um sistema autônomo para rastreamento de linhas de transmissão de energia utilizando VANTs de forma eficiente e com baixos custos de implantação e operação, baseado exclusivamente no processamento de imagens em tempo real que identifica a estrutura das torres e linhas de transmissão durante o voo e controla a velocidade da aeronave. movimentos, guiando-o pelo caminho mais próximo possível. Um resumo do trabalho desenvolvido será apresentado nas próximas seções