Drone Services Research Articles

Multi-party transaction framework for drone services based on alliance blockchain in smart cities

With the rapid development of drone technology, drones are frequently used in all aspects of urban safety, such as emergency disaster monitoring, public safety monitoring, traffic monitoring, violation monitoring and so on, which further speeds up the pace of smart city construction. For small and medium-sized cities, the cost of buying drone is too high, and renting drone is more cost-effective. However, the leasing transactions between government departments and drone leasing companies are faced with problems such as distrust, price disputes, and increased costs caused by third-party participation. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a multi-party secure and convenient transaction framework based on alliance blockchain, which helps to build trust between drone leasing companies and government departments without worrying about privacy leakage and transaction data tampering. In addition, an intelligent pricing strategy based on contract theory is designed, which can not only maximize the utility of government departments, but also encourage drone companies to actively participate. Simulation analysis shows that the proposed drone services transaction mechanism based on blockchain and intelligent pricing strategy is very effective.

Drones-as-a-service: a simulation-based analysis for on-drone decision-making

Drone services are expected to emerge in many areas around the world in the near future and this is generating increasing interest. While there is a proliferation of ideas for various applications that can be delivered via drone services, the subject of drone service provisioning has received relatively less attention and, hence, is not well understood. We envision that a variety of drone applications (e.g. renting a drone as a security guard, to pick up and deliver something or to take an interesting photo) can be delivered as a service, using a common set of underlying service provisioning principles, such as making decisions as to whom to service next. In this paper, we study by simulation how different decision-making strategies for drones impact clients and service providers. In particular, the trade-offs between maximising provider revenue versus maximising a client’s personal satisfaction, and different combinations of factors that influence drone behaviour (e.g. speed, distribution of clients, criteria for judging client requests, service duration, effect of battery and whether drones are allowed to change their target client on-the-fly) are investigated. This research has implications for scholars as well as drone service providers and application developers.

Estimating the impact of drone-based inspection on the Levelised Cost of electricity for offshore wind farms

Using drones for infrastructure inspection is becoming routine, driven by the benefit of reducing risk and costs. In this paper, the business case for drone-based inspection is examined from the perspective of the wind farm operator and the Drone Service Provider (DSP). A physical and financial model of an offshore wind farm is built using techno-economic analysis and activity-based costing, and data from the open literature. Drone operational models are developed based on domain specific knowledge of operation practices and the predicted physical environment. Rope-access inspection is used as a baseline and accounts for 0.7% of the wind farm operational expenditure. Replacing rope-access inspection with drones reduces costs by up to 70% and decreases revenue lost due to down-time by up to 90%. Increasing autonomy of drones increases the speed at which inspections can be performed but increases costs and complexity. For wind farm operator there is marginal economic benefit (2% reduction in inspection costs) in moving towards a fully autonomous drone-based inspection system from the current visual line of sight operation of single drone. However, from the point of view of the DSP, fully autonomous operations allow greater scalability of the business and enables higher utilisation of the fleet.

Which States Are Prepared for the Drone Industry? A 50-State Report Card, Release 2.0

Worldwide, commercial drone services are being tested and permitted. Progress in the United States has been slow, in part because of a lack of clarity about the federal and state roles over drones and airspace management. To jumpstart the drone industry, states can create drone highways— aerial corridors directly above public roads. We score and rank the 50 states based on their laws and drone industry data that indicate their preparedness for drones and drone highways. Many states have laws that allow cities to lease the air rights above public roads, vest air rights with property owners, and establish avigation easements. With these laws, states can facilitate future drone operations in low-altitude airspace while Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration develop national drone policies. Creating a clear and coherent framework at the state and local level, such as a system of drone highways, will make parcel delivery faster, improve distribution of medical supplies, and create technology and logistics jobs.

TO WHAT EXTENT DOES THE CURRENT EU REGULATORY FRAMEWORK FOR CIVILIAN DRONES ADDRESS PRIVACY ISSUES?

Drone operation for civil purposes is a path-breaking innovation for all sectors of society. Drones, which were initially used for military purposes only, are currently widely applied for different civil purposes, such as recreational and commercial use, disaster relief, agriculture, construction management and other purposes. The drone industry is expected to employ more than 100,000 people and have an economic impact for more than €10 billion annually by 2025.2 To achieve their full potential, it is vitally important to assess the potential risks drones might pose considering their characteristics and how this risk could be eliminated. It is also globally acknowledged that drones need to be integrated into non-segregated airspace, without compromising the achieved standards of civil aviation for manned aircraft in any way. There are very important aspects linked to drone operation that are equally relevant to individuals both on the ground and in the air as well as to states and users of the airspace of interest for both manned and unmanned aircraft operation, among them is privacy. There are no direct instruments addressing privacy concerns related to drone operation. Therefore, existing treaties and regulations should be examined to determine whether these privacy issues are covered by national, regional and global regulatory frameworks of the EU. As stressed in the Riga Declaration: “Public acceptance is key to the growth of drone services”. Therefore, addressing privacy issues sufficiently is a permanent force affecting the growth of the drone industry.

Blockchain-Powered Policy Enforcement for Ensuring Flight Compliance in Drone-Based Service Systems

Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, can be used for commercial services such as short-dis-tance delivery. In order to ensure quality services, multiple drone-based delivery service providers can be employed in delivery service systems. In this article, we address two very important and unexplored challenges of employing drones in delivery services. First, involving multiple drones from different service providers elevates the chance of collision during flights. Second, drones may hamper the privacy of citizens by unauthorized access to private and restricted areas. In order to solve the aforementioned issues, we propose a blockchain-based policy enforcement mechanism in the drone-based delivery service systems. At first, the mechanism will set policies to establish pre-allocated flight paths for different drones at different times to avoid collisions, and ensure the privacy of citizens by restricting their access to unauthorized areas. Later, the blockchain will enforce the policies to monitor compliance of the drone flights and identify non-compliant drone services to penalize corresponding service providers. We simulate a virtual drone-based delivery system with the Ethereum blockchain platform and examine the performance and feasibility of our proposed mechanism.

Resilient composition of drone services for delivery

We propose a novel resilient drone service composition framework for delivery in dynamic weather conditions. We use a skyline approach to select an optimal set of candidate drone services at the source node in a skyway network. Drone services are initially composed using a novel constraint-aware deterministic lookahead algorithm using the multi-armed bandit tree exploration. We propose a heuristic-based resilient service composition approach that adapts to runtime changes and periodically updates the composition to meet delivery expectations. Experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed approach.

Future directions in drone routing research

AbstractOptimization of routing problems using drones (unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs) has become an important area of academic research. The purpose of this article is to look to the future and help stimulate drone routing research in directions we hope will prove interesting and fruitful. We discuss opportunities for better modeling of (1) drone capabilities for both existing drones and those likely to be used in the future, (2) constraints on drone performance and operations, (3) different objectives for various drone services, and (4) alternative delivery modes, as well as some areas for methodological advances and some possible new applications. While much of the research to date has leveraged existing TSP (traveling salesman problem), VRP (vehicle routing problem), and arc routing models, we look forward to new contributions from drone research that use better models of more realistic drone types and new drone applications.

Emerging Drone Services: Challenges and Societal Issues

A recent application using drones for business is the Google project (Wing) approved in early 2019 [25]. Urban Air Mobility projects with drone services, though mainly focusing on delivery of parcels, are taking off in over 60 cities around the world [23]. As with many advances in technology, e.g., smartphones, there is an emergence of a service ecosystem associated with the technology (e.g., an app store marketplace). Similarly, it is not difficult to imagine that a range of services associated with drones will emerge in the near future. The purpose of this article is to discuss the concept of drone services, sometimes referred to as Drones-as-a-Service, and to discuss societal issues with drone services.

The Effect of Technology Acceptance Factors on Behavioral Intention for Agricultural Drone Service by Mediating Effect of Perceived Benefits

The Effect of Technology Acceptance Factors on Behavioral Intention for Agricultural Drone Service by Mediating Effect of Perceived Benefits

An internet of things assisted drone based approach to reduce rapid spread of COVID-19

With the quick spread of pandemic disease, many individuals have lost their lives across different parts of the world. So, the need for a novel approach or model to overcome the problem becomes a necessity. In this paper, a mechanism is proposed called DBCMS (Drone Based Covid-19 Medical Service) for the safety of medical employees who are prone to Covid-19 infection. The proposed mechanism can effectively improve the treatment process of Covid-19 patients. Drones are nowadays commonly used in the field of medical emergency situations. The proposed model in this paper uses drone service to reduce the risk of infection to the doctors or other medical staff, thereby preventing the disease spread. This paper further assumes that the primary step is to isolate people at their home instead of admitting them to the hospitals, also called a situation of lockdown or curfew. Thus, in this way, the spread can be significantly reduced across the globe if DBCMS approach is implemented at cluster level.

Fundamental Elements of an Urban UTM

Urban airspace environments present exciting new opportunities for delivering drone services to an increasingly large global market, including: information gathering; package delivery; air-taxi services. A key challenge is how to model airspace environments over densely populated urban spaces, coupled with the design and development of scalable traffic management systems that may need to handle potentially hundreds to thousands of drone movements per hour. This paper explores the background to Urban unmanned traffic management (UTM), examining high-level initiatives, such as the USA’s Unmanned Air Traffic (UTM) systems and Europe’s U-Space services, as well as a number of contemporary research activities in this area. The main body of the paper describes the initial research outputs of the U-Flyte R&D group, based at Maynooth University in Ireland, who have focused on developing an integrated approach to airspace modelling and traffic management platforms for operating large drone fleets over urban environments. This work proposes pragmatic and innovative approaches to expedite the roll-out of these much-needed urban UTM solutions. These approaches include the certification of drones for urban operation, the adoption of a collaborative and democratic approach to designing urban airspace, the development of a scalable traffic management and the replacement of direct human involvement in operating drones and coordinating drone traffic with machines. The key fundamental elements of airspace architecture and traffic management for busy drone operations in urban environments are described together with initial UTM performance results from simulation studies.

Which States Are Prepared for the Drone Industry? A 50-State Report Card

Worldwide, commercial drone services are being tested and permitted. Progress in the United States has been slow, in part because of a lack of clarity about the federal and state roles over drones and airspace management. To jump-start the drone industry, states can create drone highways — aerial corridors directly above public roads. We score and rank the 50 states based on their laws and drone industry data that indicate their preparedness for drones and drone highways. By adopting laws that allow cities to lease the air rights above public roads, vest air rights with property owners, and establish avigation easements, states can facilitate drone integration independent of reform from Congress or the Federal Aviation Administration. Creating a clear and coherent framework, such as a system of drone highways, will make parcel delivery faster, improve distribution of medical supplies, and create technology and logistics jobs.

Agro-Innovation – Path to Agricultural Entrepreneurship: Feasibility Study

Technology changes will always be for the better, not only to the end users but also to the intellectual property owners of the technology and the implementers of the technology. The objective of this paper is to study the feasibility and viability for entrepreneurs to become service providers for the dispensation of fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and supporting services such as aerial crop reconnaissance using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or drones. The methodology used for this study is SWOT Analysis. Both primary and secondary data is used for this analysis. This study finds that paddy farming employing drones is feasible. The beneficiaries of this study shall be the government, by way of lowering financial cost to subsidise the paddy planting, the farmers who no longer need the services of migrant workers, thus saving production cost, and finally the drone service providers and their downstream business associates who can engaged themselves in very lucrative businesses.

Analysis of the Weights of Service Quality Indicators for Drone Filming and Photography by the Fuzzy Analytic Network Process

The service of drone filming and photography has been getting more and more popular. However, the service provider does not have enough information about service quality indicators and its weights. Analyzing the weights of service quality indicators by the Fuzzy Analytic Network Process (FANP) combined with Similarity Aggregation Method (SAM) is an important research topic. Therefore, in order to solve this real life problem, based on the SERVQUAL scale, this research analyzes the weights and the rankings from a comprehensive consensus by FANP combined with geometric mean and SAM, and then compares the differences between them. The results reveal that both the comprehensive consensus of experts’ opinions deemed that the most important dimension and indicator are reliability and “Employees are professional and get adequate support to do their jobs well.” The 2nd to 4th indicators from a comprehensive consensus of experts’ opinions are the same but the order is different. They are: “Drone service team’s employees give custom personal attention,” “Drone service team has up-to-date equipment,” and “Drone service team provides service legally, safely, and reliably.” The findings of the research reveal the weights of dimensions and indicators and help us to keep good service quality of filming and photography by drone.

Drone services: issues in drones for location-based services from human-drone interaction to information processing

ABSTRACT Recently, drones (or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)) are getting increasing attention and taking mobile computing to a new era. Due to the support of highly advanced technologies, soon they might be ubiquitous and networks of drones might be used in providing civilian drone services. In this paper, we provide a survey of drone services and applications, data management for drones, data services using drones, distributed computing trends fuelled by drones and a range of human-drone interaction research which is useful if drones are to regularly serve non-technical users, while highlighting the specific concerns in data management and airborne Internet-of-Things (IoT) computing infrastructure. We present concepts such as drones-as-a-service and fly-in, fly-out computing infrastructure, and note data management and system design issues that arise in these situations. Issues of Big Data arising from such applications, optimising the configuration of airborne and ground infrastructure to provide the best QoS and QoE, situation-awareness, scalability, reliability, scheduling for efficiency, interaction with users and drones using different methods are noted.

Enabling Drone Services: Drone Crowdsourcing and Drone Scripting

Drones are rapidly finding their way into civilian applications, and are mostly networked, enabling their remote programming, and connectivity with humans. However, drones are limited by the weight they can carry and battery power resulting in limited resources. Moreover, some applications require utilising multiple drones to act in coordination. The combination of utilising nearby devices (i.e. with additional resources beyond the drone capability) and controlling multiple drones in a more convenient way has the potential to overcome these limitations. This paper proposes and examines programmable crowd-powered drones, involving two key concepts for combining drones and smartphones as a crowd-powered resource cloud. In particular, we focus on crowd-sourcing for drone computations, and multi-drone service management using a new scripting language for coordinated flight paths of multiple drones. We describe our underlying model and experimentation with these concepts. We then extensively discuss the prospect of drones servicing communities within IoT ecosystems, as a future direction.

Movable Unmanned Aerial System: Optimization of System, Resource Design and Drone Routing

One of the strengths of drone is the mobility. Drone can fly without avoiding obstacles and provide services in a timely manner. However ironically, the mobility of drone cannot last for long duration due to the low battery capacity and limited loadable products. As a consequence, the use of drones may be extremely limited in a wide field of operation. One of the solutions for complementing such weaknesses of drone is the use of movable stations. Stations move across a wide field of operation and replenish consumables for drones, such as battery and service product. By visiting movable stations and replenishing consumables, drones can provide persistent service in a wide range of operation area. In this study, design and operation issues of movable unmanned aerial system (MUAS) are address for long term and persistent drone service. A two-phase optimization approach is developed to efficiently handle the system complexity. In the phase I, locations of movable stations and allocation of tasks are identified for multi-period of service duration. In the phase II, number of drones for each station and their routings are optimized based on the result of phase I. Mathematical models are proposed and verified with a case study.

A modified Ant Colony Optimization algorithm to solve a dynamic traveling salesman problem: A case study with drones for wildlife surveillance

Abstract This study presents a novel Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) framework to solve a dynamic traveling salesman problem. To maintain diversity via transferring knowledge to the pheromone trails from previous environments, Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) based immigrant schemes have been developed and compared with existing ACO-based immigrant schemes available in the literature. Numerical results indicate that the proposed immigrant schemes can handle dynamic environments efficiently compared to other immigrant-based ACOs. Finally, a real life case study for wildlife surveillance (specifically, deer) by drones has been developed and solved using the proposed algorithm. Results indicate that the drone service capabilities can be significantly impacted when the dynamicity of deer are taken into consideration. Highlights Proposed a novel ACO-ALNS based metaheuristic. Four variants of the proposed metaheuristic is developed to investigate the efficiency of each of them. A real life case study mirroring the behavior of DTSP is developed.

Responsible Design of Drones and Drone Services - A Synthetic Report

The term “drone” is the common language of all types of aircraft without a pilot on board and their ancillary components, such as a control station, if applicable. In addition to the common term “drone”, other terms and acronyms, among others, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Unmanned Aircraft (UA), Pilotless Aircraft and Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) are also widely used in publications. In the past 5 years, drones have demonstrated significant growth in civil market as not only a leisure product but also a tool which can provide professional services. Professional uses of drones include, among others, agricultural services, surveillance, search and rescue, monitoring and inspection, parcel delivery and picturing and filming. Compared to conducting those services above by manpower, drones provide services in higher efficiency and accuracy, decrease the cost of actions, and expand the accessibility. The deployment of drones has impacts on individuals, the society and the environment. The potential threat to aviation safety as well as the safety of persons and properties on the ground is a central issue. In addition, given that drones are very often equipped with cameras and sensors, the potential violation to personal privacy and data protection by drone users is the major barrier that hinders the public acceptance of drone applications.