Aerial Data Collection Research Articles

A framework to enhance disaster debris estimation with AI and aerial photogrammetry

This study addresses the critical need to enhance disaster preparedness and response, focusing on hurricane impact assessment and debris estimation. Accurate assessments in this context are critical for post-event search-and-rescue (SAR) operations and resource distribution. Recent computing advancements are revealing the potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in collecting data and assisting with post-hurricane reconnaissance. However, the use of AI and UAV photogrammetry for accurate disaster impact analysis remains underexplored. To this end, this study proposes a damage and debris analysis framework harnessing reality capture through aerial imagery and photogrammetry. Within this framework, a region-based neural network is leveraged to detect debris locations in aerial imagery with favorable performance. In a testbed within the Beaumont-Port Arthur region, in Southeast Texas, this study performs 3D reality captures of the built environment. Since the accuracy of the 3D reality capture is of importance in research areas associated with time-sensitive disaster response, we further investigate the optimal 2D aerial imagery overlap ratio required to generate a sufficiently accurate 3D model for disaster impact analysis and debris volume estimation. Results indicate that, in the case of aerial imagery for infrastructure systems, a minimum of 60 % overlap is recommended for damage assessment and debris analysis. In contrast, for flat green areas, a minimum of 50 % overlap is adequate. Overall, for disaster response applications, our study reveals that an overlap ratio between 60 % and 70 % is optimal for achieving a balance between time efficiency and data quality in aerial data collection. These quantitative recommendations are crucial for enabling efficient disaster response efforts. Additionally, our study outcomes will improve disaster impact analysis and facilitating timely and effective response strategies.

Taking Flight for a Greener Planet: How Swarming Could Help Monitor Air Pollution Sources

As the world grapples with the pressing challenge of environmental sustainability, the need for innovative solutions to combat air pollution has become paramount. Air pollution is a complex issue that necessitates real-time monitoring of pollution sources for effective mitigation. This paper explores the potential of swarm algorithms applied as a novel and efficient approach to address this critical environmental concern. Swarm algorithms offer a promising framework for coordinating fleets of drones to collaboratively monitor and analyze air pollution sources. The unique capabilities of drones, including their agility, accessibility, and versatility, make them ideal candidates for aerial data collection. When harnessed in a swarm, these drones can create a dynamic and adaptable network that provides a more comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of air pollution dynamics. This paper delves into the conceptual foundations of using swarm algorithms in drone-based air pollution monitoring.

Precision Mapping of Coastal Wetlands: An Integrated Remote Sensing Approach Using Unoccupied Aerial Systems Light Detection and Ranging and Multispectral Data

Coastal wetlands, crucial for global biodiversity and climate adaptation, provide essential ecosystem services such as carbon storage and flood protection. These vital areas are increasingly threatened by both natural and human-induced changes, prompting the need for advanced monitoring techniques. This study employs unmanned aerial systems (UASs) equipped with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and multispectral sensors to survey diverse wetland types across 8 sites in North Carolina. Utilizing high-resolution elevation data and detailed vegetation analysis, coupled with sophisticated machine learning algorithms, we achieved differentiated and highly precise classifications of wetland types. Classification accuracies varied by type, with estuarine intertidal emergent wetlands showing the highest classification accuracies due to less complex vegetation structure and clearer spectral signatures, especially when collections account for tidal influence. In contrast, palustrine forested and scrub–shrub wetlands presented lower accuracies, often due to the denser, mixed, and more complex vegetation structure and variable inundation levels, which complicate spectral differentiation and ground returns from LiDAR sensors. Overall, our integrated UAS-derived LiDAR and multispectral approach not only enhances the accuracy of wetland mapping but also offers a scalable, efficient, and cost-effective method that substantially advances conservation efforts and informs policy-making for coastal resilience. By demonstrating the usefulness of small-scale aerial data collection in ecological mapping, this study highlights the transformative potential of merging advanced technologies in environmental monitoring, underscoring their critical role in sustaining natural habitats and aiding in climate change mitigation strategies.

Flood Inundation and Depth Mapping Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Combined with High-Resolution Multispectral Imagery

The identification of flood hazards during emerging public safety crises such as hurricanes or flash floods is an invaluable tool for first responders and managers yet remains out of reach in any comprehensive sense when using traditional remote-sensing methods, due to cloud cover and other data-sourcing restrictions. While many remote-sensing techniques exist for floodwater identification and extraction, few studies demonstrate an up-to-day understanding with better techniques in isolating the spectral properties of floodwaters from collected data, which vary for each event. This study introduces a novel method for delineating near-real-time inundation flood extent and depth mapping for storm events, using an inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based multispectral remote-sensing platform, which was designed to be applicable for urban environments, under a wide range of atmospheric conditions. The methodology is demonstrated using an actual flooding-event—Hurricane Zeta during the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season. Referred to as the UAV and Floodwater Inundation and Depth Mapper (FIDM), the methodology consists of three major components, including aerial data collection, processing, and flood inundation (water surface extent) and depth mapping. The model results for inundation and depth were compared to a validation dataset and ground-truthing data, respectively. The results suggest that UAV-FIDM is able to predict inundation with a total error (sum of omission and commission errors) of 15.8% and produce flooding depth estimates that are accurate enough to be actionable to determine road closures for a real event.

Analysis of airport design for introducing infrastructure for autonomous drones

PurposeConnecting autonomous drones to ground operations and services is a prerequisite for the adoption of scalable and sustainable drone services in the built environment. Despite the rapid advance in the field of autonomous drones, the development of ground infrastructure has received less attention. Contemporary airport design offers potential solutions for the infrastructure serving autonomous drone services. To that end, this paper aims to construct a framework for connecting air and ground operations for autonomous drone services. Furthermore, the paper defines the minimum facilities needed to support unmanned aerial vehicles for autonomous logistics and the collection of aerial data.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews the state-of-the-art in airport design literature as the basis for analysing the guidelines of manned aviation applicable to the development of ground infrastructure for autonomous drone services. Socio-technical system analysis was used for identifying the service needs of drones.FindingsThe key findings are functional modularity based on the principles of airport design applies to micro-airports and modular service functions can be connected efficiently with an autonomous ground handling system in a sustainable manner addressing the concerns on maintenance, reliability and lifecycle.Research limitations/implicationsAs the study was limited to the airport design literature findings, the evolution of solutions may provide features supporting deviating approaches. The role of autonomy and cloud-based service processes are quintessentially different from the conventional airport design and are likely to impact real-life solutions as the area of future research.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study provided a framework for establishing the connection between the airside and the landside for the operations of autonomous aerial services. The lack of such framework and ground infrastructure has hindered the large-scale adoption and easy-to-use solutions for sustainable logistics and aerial data collection for decision-making in the built environment.Social implicationsThe evolution of future autonomous aerial services should be accessible to all users, “democratising” the use of drones. The data collected by drones should comply with the privacy-preserving use of the data. The proposed ground infrastructure can contribute to offloading, storing and handling aerial data to support drone services’ acceptability.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, the paper describes the first design framework for creating a design concept for a modular and autonomous micro-airport system for unmanned aviation based on the applied functions of full-size conventional airports.

Digitalization and Spatial Documentation of Post-Earthquake Temporary Housing in Central Italy: An Integrated Geomatic Approach Involving UAV and a GIS-Based System

Geoinformation and aerial data collection are essential during post-earthquake emergency response. This research focuses on the long-lasting spatial impacts of temporary solutions, which have persisted in regions of Central Italy affected by catastrophic seismic events over the past 25 years, significantly and permanently altering their landscapes. The paper analyses the role of geomatic and photogrammetric tools in documenting the emergency process and projects in post-disaster phases. An Atlas of Temporary Architectures is proposed, which defines a common semantic and geometric codification for mapping temporary housing from territorial to urban and building scales. The paper presents an implementation of attribute specification in existing official cartographic data, including geometric entities in a 3D GIS data model platform for documenting and digitalising these provisional contexts. To achieve this platform, UAV point clouds are integrated with non-metric data to ensure a complete description in a multiscalar approach. Accurate topographic modifications can be captured by extracting very high-resolution orthophotos and elevation models (DSM and DTM). The results have been validated in Visso (Macerata), a small historical mountain village in Central Italy which was heavily damaged by the seismic events of 2016/2017. The integrated approach overcomes the existing gaps and emphasizes the importance of managing heterogeneous geospatial emergency data for classification purposes. It also highlights the need to enhance an interoperable knowledge base method for post-disaster temporary responses. By combining geomatic tools with architectural studies, these visualization techniques can support national and local organizations responsible for post-earthquake management through a 3D modelling method to aid future transformations or interventions following other natural disasters.

Multi-temporal Pacific madrone leaf blight assessment with unoccupied aircraft systems

Pacific madrone leaf blight (PMLB) is a contributing agent to the decline of Pacific madrone (Arbutus menziesii) trees. Multiple fungal pathogens cause PMLB, resulting in leaf spotting that can eventually kill leaves, increasing stress in individuals, and leaving them more susceptible to deadly cankers. Spores transmit via air and water droplets, particularly during wet Spring months. Unoccupied aircraft systems (UAS) technologies are in their relative infancy, but UAS are becoming more affordable and accessible. UAS promise increased efficiency in forest health monitoring applications, providing a safer aerial data collection method at a relatively-low cost when compared to occupied aircraft. In this study, we develop and present a UAS methodology to detect PMLB with a multispectral sensor. This methodology combines orthomosaic products derived from high-resolution (~4 cm) multirotor platform UAS multispectral imagery with machine learning and ground assessment of PMLB to classify visual presence of blight at the individual tree-level during multiple site revisits. The resulting model detected PMLB infection status of 29 field surveyed madrone trees with a kappa coefficient of , a balanced accuracy of 0.85, and a true positive rate of 0.92. The method presented here can be readily scaled to efficiently cover a much larger extent with a beyond-line-of-site capable UAS and minimal field sampling. The increased efficiency of this approach may be critical to characterizing PMLB in the near future as it is anticipated that PMLB prevalence will continue to increase as a result of climate change.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Aerial Data Collection in Hybrid-Powered NOMA-IoT Networks

With the help of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), remote terminals that out of wireless coverage can be connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Currently, the IoT relies on a large number of low-cost wireless sensors with limited energy supply to realize ubiquitous monitoring and intelligent control. The hybrid-powered networks composed of wireless-powered communication (WPC) terminal and solar-powered UAV can solve the energy supply problem of the IoT networks, and the nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique can solve the massive access problem of IoT terminals. Exploiting these benefits, we investigate joint UAV 3-D trajectory design and time allocation for aerial data collection in hybrid-powered NOMA-IoT networks. To maximize the total fair network throughput, we jointly consider energy limitation, Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, and flight conditions. The problem is nonconvex and time-dimension coupled which is intractable to solve by traditional optimization methods. Therefore, we develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm called fair communication is accomplished by trajectory design and time allocation (FC-TDTA), which uses the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) as its basis. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm performs better than benchmarks in fair throughput maximization. The proposed FC-TDTA algorithm can make the UAV: 1) fly in appropriate direction and speed, so that the UAV can arrive at the charging station before the energy runs out and 2) conduct WPC energy transmission and data collection to achieve fair communication.

Methane Emissions from Natural Gas Gathering Pipelines in the Permian Basin.

The rapid reduction of methane emissions, especially from oil and gas (O&G) operations, is a critical part of slowing global warming. However, few studies have attempted to specifically characterize emissions from natural gas gathering pipelines, which tend to be more difficult to monitor on the ground than other forms of O&G infrastructure. In this study, we use methane emission measurements collected from four recent aerial campaigns in the Permian Basin, the most prolific O&G basin in the United States, to estimate a methane emission factor for gathering lines. From each campaign, we calculate an emission factor between 2.7 (+1.9/-1.8, 95% confidence interval) and 10.0 (+6.4/-6.2) Mg of CH4 year-1 km-1, 14-52 times higher than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's national estimate for gathering lines and 4-13 times higher than the highest estimate derived from a published ground-based survey of gathering lines. Using Monte Carlo techniques, we demonstrate that aerial data collection allows for a greater sample size than ground-based data collection and therefore more comprehensive identification of emission sources that comprise the heavy tail of methane emissions distributions. Our results suggest that pipeline emissions are underestimated in current inventories and highlight the importance of a large sample size when calculating basinwide pipeline emission factors.

Automatic speech recognition for unmanned aerial vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as unmanned aerial systems (UASs), are quickly becoming a ubiquitous technology, poised to enter some key large-scale markets in the very near future. Fleets of such vehicles will be required in these large-scale deployments for commercial, industrial, and emergency response, along with the ability to efficiently control these fleets. Voice control and communication between human operators and these fleets will become imperative. This paper explores the framework for building an automatic speech recognition (ASR) use to the control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The ARS system will be used by Aeronyde Corporation to fully-autonomous fleets with minimal human intervention. Aeronyde Corporation is working to shift and advance the current industry thinking of unmanned platforms from Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) to fully-autonomous fleets with minimal human intervention. The Aeronyde Avionics package enables a single operator to control and monitor missions of many drones in real time anywhere in the world. The “1 Pilot – Many Drones” approach to aerial data collection is revolutionary for Big Data aggregation and analytics of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Multi-UAV autonomous aerial systems will transform data acquisition for many commercial applications, including: agriculture and forestry, railroad inspections, pipeline inspections, powerline inspections, windmill inspections, terrain mapping, search and rescue, firefighting and police work, and border patrol.

Drone mapping of damage information in GPS-Denied disaster sites

The increasing number and severity of natural hazard events in recent years, and their devastating impact on human life, local economies, and the built environment has called governments around the world into action and created a new mandate for a paradigm shift in disaster management and mitigation policies. To this end, new affordable technologies with mobile connectivity (e.g., smartphones, unmanned systems, reality capture devices) have scaled up tasks such as data collection and curation, leading to a significant increase in the volume of data gathered and shared in the aftermath of disasters. In the meantime, advancements in high-power and distributed computing have created new opportunities in fast and reliable data analytics. In particular to the application of drones in disaster response, past research has primarily focused on aerial data collection and more recently, ground object detection. Geolocalization of drone data (i.e., the process of determining the geographical position of objects in drone’s field of view), however, is a complex task that relies on prior knowledge of the drone’s geolocation (e.g., flight path coordinates, inertial sensors, camera gaze). Such metadata may not be always available or shared across platforms especially with the increased use of crowdsourcing in disaster response, damage assessment, and recovery. This paper presents a methodology for spatial mapping of disaster impact information in drone videos without reliance on GPS data of the aerial camera. We perform progressive mapping using scale-invariant visual features in red–greenblue (RGB) videos of disaster-affected sites in two major hurricanes in North America, namely Harvey (2017) and Dorian (2019). Results indicate that the proposed methodology can project objects from the perspective view of a drone camera onto an orthogonal map with 32.7–36.9 ft of average root mean square (RMS) error in a land area of 18–45 acres.

LoRa Communications as an Enabler for Internet of Drones towards Large-Scale Livestock Monitoring in Rural Farms.

Currently, smart farming is considered an effective solution to enhance the productivity of farms; thereby, it has recently received broad interest from service providers to offer a wide range of applications, from pest identification to asset monitoring. Although the emergence of digital technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs), has led to significant advances in the smart farming industry, farming operations still need more efficient solutions. On the other hand, the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, is growing rapidly across many civil application domains. This paper aims to develop a farm monitoring system that incorporates UAV, LPWAN, and IoT technologies to transform the current farm management approach and aid farmers in obtaining actionable data from their farm operations. In this regard, an IoT-based water quality monitoring system was developed because water is an essential aspect in livestock development. Then, based on the Long-Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN®) technology, a multi-channel LoRaWAN® gateway was developed and integrated into a vertical takeoff and landing drone to convey collected data from the sensors to the cloud for further analysis. In addition, to develop LoRaWAN®-based aerial communication, a series of measurements and simulations were performed under different configurations and scenarios. Finally, to enhance the efficiency of aerial-based data collection, the UAV path planning was optimized. Measurement results showed that the maximum achievable LoRa coverage when operating on-air via the drone is about 10 km, and the Longley–Rice irregular terrain model provides the most suitable path loss model for the scenario of large-scale farms, and a multi-channel gateway with a spreading factor of 12 provides the most reliable communication link at a high drone speed (up to 95 km/h). Simulation results showed that the developed system can overcome the coverage limitation of LoRaWAN® and it can establish a reliable communication link over large-scale wireless sensor networks. In addition, it was shown that by optimizing flight paths, aerial data collection could be performed in a much shorter time than industrial mission planning (up to four times in our case).

Drone-Based Community Assessment, Planning, and Disaster Risk Management for Sustainable Development

Accessible, low-cost technologies and tools are needed in the developing world to support community planning, disaster risk assessment, and land tenure. Enterprise-scale geographic information system (GIS) software and high-resolution aerial or satellite imagery are tools which are typically not available to or affordable for resource-limited communities. In this paper, we present a concept of aerial data collection, 3D cadastre modeling, and disaster risk assessment using low-cost drones and adapted open-source software. Computer vision/machine learning methods are used to create a classified 3D cadastre that contextualizes and quantifies potential natural disaster risk to existing or planned infrastructure. Building type and integrity are determined from aerial imagery. Potential flood damage risk to a building is evaluated as a function of three mechanisms: undermining (erosion) of the foundation, hydraulic pressure damage, and building collapse due to water load. Use of Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) provides water runoff estimates that are improved using classified land features (urban ecology, erosion marks) to improve flow direction estimates. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained to find these flood-induced erosion marks from high-resolution drone imagery. A flood damage potential metric scaled by property value estimates results in individual and community property risk assessments.

Design and Implementation of a Quadcopter Based on a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR)

This paper presents the design and construction and control of a quadcopter drone for Aerial Data Collection (ADC). The frame of the drone was designed using CadDian Software and the parts were printed using a 3D printer. The flight controller was based on Arduino board using an Atmega328p microprocessor with GSM, GPS and GPRS for sending data over the internet and also enhancing long range flight. A feedback control system was developed and tested to control the stability of drone. The proposed control strategy of the drone was tested for a case of pursuit of trajectory and also for speed of response and the findings were very positive confirming the appropriateness of the control measures for independent and autonomous flying with promising precision. This Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) fitted with IoT has the capability of collecting and sending data over the internet and therefore can be used in many applications including risk assessment, forestry management, urban planning, coastal zone management, infrastructure monitoring, post-disaster damage assessment and delivery of medical supplies.

Effects of Piers on Water Recession on the Southern Shores of Winam Gulf, Homa- Bay County, Kenya

Piers are important man-made water vessel landing facilities in lakes and seas. A study on the effects of piers on water recession was conducted on the Southern shores of Winam Gulf of lake Victoria, Homa Bay County in Kenya. It was conducted in three pier points namely Kendu Bay, Kowour/Homa Lime and Homa Bay. The study aimed at explaining a phenomenon whereby the Western side of the piers on the Southern shores of the gulf, having more water recession than on their Eastern side. This unique phenomenon has not been sufficiently researched on hence, instigated the research. It collected data on the length of recession at the sides of the piers, directions of water currents flow based on devised simple current simulator and empirical studies. Google map and Landsat map techniques were used for aerial data collection. Ground truthing was carried out to corroborate the findings of the aerial data based on physical ground measurement and observation. The result had it that the sides of the piers facing currents directly were more recessed than the opposite sides. Homa Bay pier had its Western side 38m shorter than the Eastern side which had only receded 2m. Kowuor/Homa Lime pier had its Northern side 32m more recessed than the Southern side. The drenching works at Kendu Bay pier at the time of study, made it impossible to accurately measure its sides under recession. However, it showed the same trend based on Landsat and Google maps data. The data were presented using photographs, ‘current rose,’ maps and diagrams.

Efficient and Reliable Aerial Communication With Wireless Sensors

This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a first of its kind cross-layer protocol for wireless communication between flying agents and terrestrial wireless sensors. The protocol is composed of three layers: a new application layer built upon a modified implementation of ContikiMAC over the IEEE 802.15.4 2.4 GHz physical layer. The experimental evaluation shows the protocol to have excellent energy efficiency, low latency and high reliability—approaching 100% for certain parameter settings and operational conditions. The effects of speed, altitude, and direction of approach are also experimentally evaluated, demonstrating that it is of critical importance to take these into account when planning mobile aerial data collection campaigns.

Deep Learning-Based Damage Detection from Aerial SfM Point Clouds

Aerial data collection is well known as an efficient method to study the impact following extreme events. While datasets predominately include images for post-disaster remote sensing analyses, images alone cannot provide detailed geometric information due to a lack of depth or the complexity required to extract geometric details. However, geometric and color information can easily be mined from three-dimensional (3D) point clouds. Scene classification is commonly studied within the field of machine learning, where a workflow follows a pipeline operation to compute a series of engineered features for each point and then points are classified based on these features using a learning algorithm. However, these workflows cannot be directly applied to an aerial 3D point cloud due to a large number of points, density variation, and object appearance. In this study, the point cloud datasets are transferred into a volumetric grid model to be used in the training and testing of 3D fully convolutional network models. The goal of these models is to semantically segment two areas that sustained damage after Hurricane Harvey, which occurred in 2017, into six classes, including damaged structures, undamaged structures, debris, roadways, terrain, and vehicles. These classes are selected to understand the distribution and intensity of the damage. The point clouds consist of two distinct areas assembled using aerial Structure-from-Motion from a camera mounted on an unmanned aerial system. The two datasets contain approximately 5000 and 8000 unique instances, and the developed methods are assessed quantitatively using precision, accuracy, recall, and intersection over union metrics.

Optimizing 802.15.4 Outdoor IoT Sensor Networks for Aerial Data Collection

Rural IoT sensor networks, prevalent in environmental monitoring and precision agriculture, commonly operate over some variant of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Data collection from these networks is often challenging, as they may be deployed in remote regions where existing backhaul infrastructure is expensive or absent. With the commercial and industrial success of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), there is understandable interest in using UASs for delay tolerant data collection from 802.15.4 IoT sensor networks. In this study, we investigate how to optimize 802.15.4 networks for aerial data collection, which, unlike other wireless standards, has not received rigorous evaluation for three-dimensional aerial communication. We analyze experimental measurements from an outdoor aerial testbed, examining how factors, such as antenna orientation, altitude, antenna placement, and obstruction, affect signal strength and packet reception rate. In our analysis, we model and predict the quality of service for aerial data collection, based on these network configuration variables, and contrast that with the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI)—a commonly used signal strength metric. We find that network configuration plays a significant role in network quality, which RSSI, a mediator variable, struggles to account for in the presence of high packet loss. We conclude with a discussion of strategies for optimizing sensor network configuration for aerial data collection, in light of our results.

Multiple Flights or Single Flight Instrument Fusion of Hyperspectral and ALS Data? A Comparison of their Performance for Vegetation Mapping

Fusion of remote sensing data often improves vegetation mapping, compared to using data from only a single source. The effectiveness of this fusion is subject to many factors, including the type of data, collection method, and purpose of the analysis. In this study, we compare the usefulness of hyperspectral (HS) and Airborne Laser System (ALS) data fusion acquired in separate flights, Multiple Flights Data Fusion (MFDF), and during a single flight through Instrument Fusion (IF) for the classification of non-forest vegetation. An area of 6.75 km2 was selected, where hyperspectral and ALS data was collected during two flights in 2015 and one flight in 2017. This data was used to classify three non-forest Natura 2000 habitats i.e., Xeric sand calcareous grasslands (code 6120), alluvial meadows of river valleys of the Cnidion dubii (code 6440), species-rich Nardus grasslands (code 6230) using a Random Forest classifier. Our findings show that it is not possible to determine which sensor, HS, or ALS used independently leads to a higher classification accuracy for investigated Natura 2000 habitats. Concurrently, increased stability and consistency of classification results was confirmed, regardless of the type of fusion used; IF, MFDF and varied information relevance of single sensor data. The research shows that the manner of data collection, using MFDF or IF, does not determine the level of relevance of ALS or HS data. The analysis of fusion effectiveness, gauged as the accuracy of the classification result and time consumed for data collection, has shown a superiority of IF over MFDF. IF delivered classification results that are more accurate compared to MFDF. IF is always cheaper than MFDF and the difference in effectiveness of both methods becomes more pronounced when the area of aerial data collection becomes larger.

Efficient data collection and tracking with flying drones

Data collection is an important mechanism for wireless sensor networks to be viable. This paper addresses the Aerial Data Collection Problem (ADCP) from a set of mobile wireless sensors located on the ground, using a fleet of flying devices. The objective is i) to deploy a set of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in a 3D space to cover and collect data from all the mobile wireless sensors at each time step through a ground-to-air communication, ii) to send these data to a central base station using multi-hop wireless air-to-air communications through the network of UAVs, iii) while minimizing the total deployment cost (communication and deployment) over time. The Aerial Data Collection Problem (ADCP) is a complex time and space coverage, and connectivity problem. We first present a mixed-integer linear program solving ADCP optimally for small instances. Then, we develop a second model solved by column generation for larger instances, with optimal or heuristic pricing programs. Results show that our approach provides very accurate solutions minimizing the data collection cost. Moreover, only a very small number of columns are generated throughout the resolution process, showing the efficiency of our approach.