ALBERO: Agile Landing on Branches for Environmental Robotics Operations

Drones have been increasingly used in various domains, including ecological monitoring in forests. However, the endurance and noise of drones have limited their deployment to short flight missions above canopies. To address these limitations, we introduce ALBERO: a framework comprising a mechanical solution and an optimal planner to realise...

A Review of Automatic Classification of Drones Using Radar: Key Considerations, Performance Evaluation and Prospects

Automatic target classification or recognition is a critical capability in noncooperative surveillance with radar in several defence and civilian applications. It is a well-established research field and numerous techniques exist for recognizing targets, including miniature unmanned air systems or drones (i.e., small, mini, micro, and nano...

A Morphing Quadrotor-Blimp with Balloon Failure Resilience for Mobile Ecological Sensing

The increasing popularity of helium-assisted blimps for extended monitoring or data collection applications is hindered by a critical limitation – single-point failure when the balloon malfunctions or bursts. To address this, we introduce <bold>Janus</bold>, a hybrid blimp-drone platform equipped with integrated balloon...

A Location-Aware and Healing Attestation Scheme for Air-Supported Internet of Vehicles

With the rapid technological advancement in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Vehicles (IoV), we witness exponential growth of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). However, these integrations of IoV with other technologies make the IoV network and its interaction between different network components highly complex. Therefore,...

Comparison of acoustic localisation techniques for drone position estimation using real-world experimental data

Due to technological advances in the drone industry, security threats induced by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more relevant. Fast and accurate localisation systems need to be designed. One approach is localisation of UAVs by their sound using acoustic techniques. So far, a systematic performance assessment of acoustic...

DroneVLC: Exploiting Drones and VLC to Gather Data from Batteryless Sensors

We explore a new alternative for drones to gather information from sensors. Instead of using the traditional radio-frequency spectrum, whose broadcast nature makes it more difficult to poll specific objects, we utilize the light spectrum. In our system, the drone carries a light, and flies to an area that it is interested in polling. Only the...

Routing of Heterogeneous Fleets for Flash Deliveries via Vehicle Group Assignment

This paper presents a novel approach to route heterogeneous fleets for flash delivery operations. Flash deliveries offer to serve customers' wishes in minutes. We investigate a scenario that allows to pick up orders at multiple depots with a heterogeneous vehicle fleet leveraging different modes of transportation. We propose the Heterogeneous...

METSIS: Hyperlocal Wind Nowcasting for U-space

The METeo Sensors in the Sky (METSIS) project, funded by SESAR’s Engage knowledge transfer network, investigated the use of drones as an aerial wind sensor network for U-space applications. The concept aims to provide accurate, lowcost and hyperlocal wind nowcasts for drones using data collected by drones themselves and the Meteo-Particle Model ...

Aerial Robotics: State-based Conflict Detection and Resolution (Detect and Avoid) in High Traffic Densities and Complexities

Purpose of Review A lot of research into decentralised, state-based conflict detection and resolution, or detect and avoid algorithms has been executed. This paper explains the essential properties of state-based conflict detection and reviews the work in the context of applications for not only manned but also unmanned aerial vehicles, where...

Chebychev moments based Drone Classification, Recognition and Fingerprinting

This paper introduces the use of a Chebychev moments' based feature for micro-Doppler based Classification, Recognition and Fingerprinting of Drones. This specific feature has been selected for its low computational cost and orthogonality property. The capability of the proposed feature extraction framework is assessed at three different levels...

Using drones in the last-mile logistics processes of medical product delivery: A feasibility case study in Rotterdam

The term last-mile delivery refers to the final leg of a business-to-customer service, in which products are shipped from a depot to a destination point by means of land transportation, such as vans and small trucks. Although these vehicles provide a common and easy way to consign products, companies are striving for new transport technologies...

The Effect of Intent on Conflict Detection and Resolution at High Traffic Densities

The use of drones for applications such as package delivery, in an urban setting, would result in traffic densities that are orders of magnitude higher than any observed in manned aviation. Such densities not only make automated conflict detection and resolution a necessity, but it will also force a reevaluation of aspects such as centralised vs...

An Ethical Framework for the Design, Development, Implementation, and Assessment of Drones Used in Public Healthcare

The use of drones in public healthcare is suggested as a means to improve efficiency under constrained resources and personnel. This paper begins by framing drones in healthcare as a social experiment where ethical guidelines are needed to protect those impacted while fully realizing the benefits the technology offers. Then we propose an...

Drones in humanitarian contexts, robot ethics, and the human–robot interaction

There are two dominant trends in the humanitarian care of 2019: the ‘technologizing of care’ and the centrality of the humanitarian principles. The concern, however, is that these two trends may conflict with one another. Faced with the growing use of drones in the humanitarian space there is need for ethical reflection to understand if this...

Challenges with obstacle data for manned and unmanned aviation

The objective of this paper is to raise awareness about the significance of collecting and ensuring the quality of the obstacle data required for the safety of air navigation for both manned and unmanned aviation. This information could be of importance to geodetic, CityGML, 3D model and Building Information Management (BIM) community. With the...

Drone Information Service Requirements for U-Space

The work presented in this paper is part of the SESAR Horizon 2020 exploratory research project DREAMS, which analyses operational and technical aspects of drone Aeronautical Information Management (AIM) for Europe’s Unmanned Traffic Management system, U-Space. The main objective of DREAMS is to analyse the present and future needs of...

Distributed multi-robot formation control in dynamic environments

This paper presents a distributed method for formation control of a homogeneous team of aerial or ground mobile robots navigating in environments with static and dynamic obstacles. Each robot in the team has a finite communication and visibility radius and shares information with its neighbors to coordinate. Our approach leverages both...

Gust Disturbance Alleviation with Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are limited in their operation outdoors near obstacles by their ability to withstand wind gusts. Currently widespread position control methods such as Proportional Integral Derivative control do not perform well under the influence of gusts. Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) is a sensor-based control...