Communication and Control in Collaborative UAVs: Recent Advances and Future Trends

The recent progress in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) technology has significantly advanced UAV-based applications for military, civil, and commercial domains. Nevertheless, the challenges of establishing high-speed communication links, flexible control strategies, and developing efficient collaborative decision-making algorithms for a swarm of UAVs limit their autonomy, robustness, and reliability. Thus, a growing focus has been witnessed on collaborative communication to allow a swarm of UAVs to coordinate and communicate autonomously for the cooperative completion of tasks in a short time with improved efficiency and reliability. This work presents a comprehensive review of collaborative communication in a multi-UAV system. We thoroughly discuss the characteristics of intelligent UAVs and their communication and control requirements for autonomous collaboration and coordination. Moreover, we review various UAV collaboration tasks, summarize the applications of UAV swarm networks for dense urban environments and present the use case scenarios to highlight the current developments of UAV-based applications in various domains. Finally, we identify several exciting future research direction that needs attention for advancing the research in collaborative UAVs

Applications of Drone Technology in the Management of Disaster and Risk Associated with COVID-19 Pandemic in the Built Environment: The Nigerian Experience

The world has of recent being faced by the effects and challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and it has had major tolls on the conditions of living, the live expectancy of building occupants, and thus affecting their expected contributions to the national economy. To provide adequate services and measures to fight the pandemic, various institutional measures are evolving daily across the globe. Amidst the measures initiated by both governmental and non-governmental formations are the provisions of medical services and the decontamination of infected buildings and areas occupied by people in order to fight the pandemic amongst the populace. However, the inability to plan, remoteness, and accessibility challenges of buildings and settlements in major parts of the country has made the delivery of relief materials, fumigation of buildings, and the rendering of other services associated with the management of both disaster and risk linked to the COVID-19 difficult. This paper, therefore, focuses on the emerging intervention initiated by an Imperial Majesty in Nigeria, the Ooni of Ile-Ife, Osun State through the adoption and supply of drones to states across the country to decontaminate likely contaminated or uncontaminated buildings and settlements occupied by people. Given the enormous benefits derivable from the adoption of the use of drone technology in the management of disaster-related issues in the built environment in the country, this paper recommends that its use should be vigorously deepened, being an emerging intervention or device through appropriate institutional supports to complement efforts of stakeholders in making the country’s built environment safe and healthy for all

Applications of Drone Technology in the Management of Disaster and Risk Associated with COVID-19 Pandemic in the Built Environment: The Nigerian Experience

The world has of recent being faced by the effects and challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and it has had major tolls on the conditions of living, the live expectancy of building occupants, and thus affecting their expected contributions to the national economy. To provide adequate services and measures to fight the pandemic, various institutional measures are evolving daily across the globe. Amidst the measures initiated by both governmental and non-governmental formations are the provisions of medical services and the decontamination of infected buildings and areas occupied by people in order to fight the pandemic amongst the populace. However, the inability to plan, remoteness, and accessibility challenges of buildings and settlements in major parts of the country has made the delivery of relief materials, fumigation of buildings, and the rendering of other services associated with the management of both disaster and risk linked to the COVID-19 difficult. This paper, therefore, focuses on the emerging intervention initiated by an Imperial Majesty in Nigeria, the Ooni of Ile-Ife, Osun State through the adoption and supply of drones to states across the country to decontaminate likely contaminated or uncontaminated buildings and settlements occupied by people. Given the enormous benefits derivable from the adoption of the use of drone technology in the management of disaster-related issues in the built environment in the country, this paper recommends that its use should be vigorously deepened, being an emerging intervention or device through appropriate institutional supports to complement efforts of stakeholders in making the country’s built environment safe and healthy for all

Bridge Inspection: Human Performance, Unmanned Aerial Systems and Automation

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have become of considerable private and commercial interest for a variety of jobs and entertainment in the past 10 years. This paper is a literature review of the state of practice for the United States bridge inspection programs and outlines how automated and unmanned bridge inspections can be made suitable for present and future needs. At its best, current technology limits UAS use to an assistive tool for the inspector to perform a bridge inspection faster, safer, and without traffic closure. The major challenges for UASs are satisfying restrictive Federal Aviation Administration regulations, control issues in a GPS-denied environment, pilot expenses and availability, time and cost allocated to tuning, maintenance, post-processing time, and acceptance of the collected data by bridge owners. Using UASs with self-navigation abilities and improving image-processing algorithms to provide results near real-time could revolutionize the bridge inspection industry by providing accurate, multi-use, autonomous three-dimensional models and damage identification

Machine Learning-Aided Operations and Communications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Contemporary Survey

The ongoing amalgamation of UAV and ML techniques is creating a significant synergy and empowering UAVs with unprecedented intelligence and autonomy. This survey aims to provide a timely and comprehensive overview of ML techniques used in UAV operations and communications and identify the potential growth areas and research gaps. We emphasise the four key components of UAV operations and communications to which ML can significantly contribute, namely, perception and feature extraction, feature interpretation and regeneration, trajectory and mission planning, and aerodynamic control and operation. We classify the latest popular ML tools based on their applications to the four components and conduct gap analyses. This survey also takes a step forward by pointing out significant challenges in the upcoming realm of ML-aided automated UAV operations and communications. It is revealed that different ML techniques dominate the applications to the four key modules of UAV operations and communications. While there is an increasing trend of cross-module designs, little effort has been devoted to an end-to-end ML framework, from perception and feature extraction to aerodynamic control and operation. It is also unveiled that the reliability and trust of ML in UAV operations and applications require significant attention before full automation of UAVs and potential cooperation between UAVs and humans come to fruition.Comment: 36 pages, 304 references, 19 Figure