Safety Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Research Articles

Vehicle-to-Vehicle Based Autonomous Flight Coordination Control System for Safer Operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The exponential growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones in recent years has raised concerns about their safe operation, especially in beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) scenarios. Existing unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) heavily relies on commercial communication networks, which may become ineffective if network infrastructures are damaged or disabled. For this challenge, we propose a novel approach that leverages vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to enhance UAV safety and efficiency in UAV operations. In this study, we present a UAV information collection and sharing system named Drone Mapper®, enabled by V2V communications, so that UAVs can share their locations with each another as well as with the ground operation station. Additionally, we introduce an autonomous flight coordination control system (AFCCS) that augments UAV safety operations by providing two essential functionalities: UAV collision avoidance and UAV formation flight, both of which work based on V2V communications. To evaluate the performance of the developed AFCCS, we conducted comprehensive field experiments focusing on UAV collision avoidance and formation flight. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system and show seamless operations among multiple UAVs.

Remaining Flying Time Prediction of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Under Different Load Conditions

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are forecast to be widely used in the military and civilian domains. The remaining flying time is a critical parameter to monitor during a flight to ensure the safety of electric UAVs (e-UAVs). However, accurate remaining flying time prediction under different load conditions requires a large amount of data and is computationally expensive for online applications. To address these issues, a deep learning approach based on temporal convolutional networks and transfer learning is developed for lithium-ion battery systems for e-UAVs. A temporal convolutional network is used to extract features from monitoring data and predict the remaining flying time of flights under one load condition. A layer transfer strategy is then used to transfer the knowledge learned from one load condition to another load condition. Battery health monitoring data collected from a fixed-wing e-UAV are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed temporal convolutional network with the transfer learning strategy can predict the remaining flying time of the e-UAV under two load conditions more efficiently and accurately than a temporal convolutional network without transfer learning.

Fine‐grained crack segmentation for high‐resolution images via a multiscale cascaded network

AbstractHigh‐resolution (HR) crack images offer more detailed information for assessing structural conditions compared to low‐resolution (LR) images. This wealth of detail proves indispensable in bolstering the safety of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)‐based inspection procedures and elevating the precision of small crack segmentation. Nonetheless, achieving a balance between segmentation accuracy and GPU memory consumption poses a substantial challenge for deep learning models when processing HR crack images. To overcome this challenge, a novel “HR crack segmentation framework” (HRCSF) is proposed, specifically designed to meticulously segment crack images with resolutions exceeding 4K. First, a multiscale crack feature extraction network (MsCFEN) was proposed with the embedment of the strip pooling operation to enhance the representation of the transverse and longitudinal crack pixels from the complex backgrounds. Subsequently, two cascaded operations were tailored to MsCFEN, enabling a comprehensive refinement process that incorporates both global and local aspects. Furthermore, to fully leverage the potential of each proposed component in the refinement process, the complete architecture was trained using a loss function with embedded boundary optimization. Conclusively, a UAV‐based case study was conducted on a real bridge in Changsha, demonstrating HRCSF's practicability in segmenting HR crack images. The implementation of HRCSF allows the UAV to perform crack inspection effectively from a distance of 3 m away from the girder, resulting in a significant 50% reduction in inspection time compared to LR segmentation methods while maintaining high detection accuracy.

An obstacle avoidance approach for UAV path planning

The recent pandemic of COVID-19 has proven to be a test case for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). UAVs have shown great potential for plenty of applications in the face of this pandemic, but their scope of applications becomes limited due to the dependency on ground pilots. Irrespective of the application, it is imperative to have an autonomous path planning to utilize UAVs to their full potential. Collision-free trajectories are expected from the path planning process to ensure the safety of UAVs and humans on the ground. This work proposes a path planning technique where collision avoidance is mathematically proven under an uncertainty prerequisite, that the UAV follows its requested moving position within some threshold distance. This scheme ensures UAV safety by considering the underlying control’s system overshoots. Obstacles play a guiding role in selecting collision-free trajectories. These obstacles are modeled as rectangular shapes with interest points defined around their corners. These points further define collision-free permissible edges, and later we apply the Dijkstra algorithm to these edges before having the desired trajectory. Regardless of the size of deployment area, our proposed scheme incurs low computational load due to the dependency on pre-defined interest points only thereby making it suitable for real-time path planning. Simulation results obtained using MATLAB’s UAV Toolbox show that the proposed method succeeds in getting short collision-free trajectories.

Review on Type of Sensors and Detection Method of Anti-Collision System of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) usage is increasing drastically worldwide as UAVs are used in various industries for many applications, such as inspection, logistics, agriculture, and many more. This is because performing a task using UAV makes the job more efficient and reduces the workload needed. However, for a UAV to be operated manually or autonomously, the UAV must be equipped with proper safety features. An anti-collision system is one of the most crucial and fundamental safety features that UAVs must be equipped with. The anti-collision system allows the UAV to maintain a safe distance from any obstacles. The anti-collision technologies are of crucial relevance to assure the survival and safety of UAVs. Anti-collision of UAVs can be varied in the aspect of sensor usage and the system's working principle. This article provides a comprehensive overview of anti-collision technologies for UAVs. It also presents drone safety laws and regulations that prevent a collision at the policy level. The process of anti-collision technologies is studied from three aspects: Obstacle detection, collision prediction, and collision avoidance. A detailed overview and comparison of the methods of each element and an analysis of their advantages and disadvantages have been provided. In addition, the future trends of UAV anti-collision technologies from the viewpoint of fast obstacle detection and wireless networking are presented.

Track Planning for Damage Detection on the Building Enclosure by UAV Considering Image Detection

Considering the rapid acquisition and detection task of building enclosure damage information and the natural environment characteristics of building enclosure, a new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) track planning framework considering image detection and UAV dynamic characteristics is proposed. Firstly, considering the position of UAV in the task space for track planning, combined with the characteristics of the sensor detection equipment carried by UAV, and the task requirements of extracting and identifying the damage edge features and texture features on the shell of the building; the detection efficiency and detection safety of UAV are improved to the maximum extent. Secondly, the Improved Circle Chaos Initialization Strategy, Adaptive Weight Strategy and Elite Perturbation Mechanism are introduced to solve the problem that the traditional honey badger algorithm (HBA) is easy to fall into local optimal solution and to ensure that the designed algorithm is more in line with the inspection planning requirements of the outer surface of the building. Furthermore, improved honey badger algorithm (IHBA) is compared with particle swarm optimization (PSO), whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and traditional badger algorithm in multi-dimensional horizontal through design simulation experiments, which shows that the design algorithm in this paper is efficient in solving the damage information collection of building enclosure.

Detection of Power Poles in Orchards Based on Improved Yolov5s Model

During the operation of agricultural unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in orchards, the presence of power poles and wires pose a serious threat to flight safety, and can even lead to crashes. Due to the difficulty of directly detecting wires, this research aimed to quickly and accurately detect wire poles, and proposed an improved Yolov5s deep learning object detection algorithm named Yolov5s-Pole. The algorithm enhances the model’s generalization ability and robustness by applying Mixup data augmentation technique, replaces the C3 module with the GhostBottleneck module to reduce the model’s parameters and computational complexity, and incorporates the Shuffle Attention (SA) module to improve its focus on small targets. The results show that when the improved Yolov5s-Pole model was used for detecting poles in orchards, its accuracy, recall, and mAP@50 were 0.803, 0.831, and 0.838 respectively, which increased by 0.5%, 10%, and 9.2% compared to the original Yolov5s model. Additionally, the weights, parameters, and GFLOPs of the Yolov5s-Pole model were 7.86 MB, 3,974,310, and 9, respectively. Compared to the original Yolov5s model, these represent compression rates of 42.2%, 43.4%, and 43.3%, respectively. The detection time for a single image using this model was 4.2 ms, and good robustness under different lighting conditions (dark, normal, and bright) was demonstrated. The model is suitable for deployment on agricultural UAVs’ onboard equipment, and is of great practical significance for ensuring the efficiency and flight safety of agricultural UAVs.

Influence of Operationally Consumed Propellers on Multirotor UAVs Airworthiness: Finite Element and Experimental Approach

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in many applications due to the current technological trend. In these applications, understanding the concept of the operating frequency range is vital to ensure UAV safety. Although most current studies are focused on health monitoring and fault diagnostic methodologies, none of them has included a comprehensive knowledge of the behavior of the natural frequency behavior. This research examines the effectiveness of computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) in advancing finite element modal analysis. Theoretical results were further evaluated on an experimentally operated drone to understand the interference concept of natural and operational frequencies. Extensive, high-quality, and comprehensive soft-labeled data was acquired in the time-domain from the selected hovering quad-copter equipped with an accelerometer sensor connected to a data acquisition system and a PC platform. Healthy propellers and operationally consumed propellers vibration signal datasets were recorded. The collected datasets were transformed to frequency-domain using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) spectrum analysis. In summary, the finite element modal analysis provided a thorough behavior understanding of the faulty operating drone status by comparing the natural frequencies to those acquired experimentally based on a detailed discussion. The relationship between natural and operational frequencies is then investigated and presented.

Opportunistic Autonomous Integrity Monitoring for Enhanced UAV Safety

An opportunistic advanced receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (OARAIM) algorithm for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation is developed. This algorithm fuses ambient terrestrial signals of opportunity (SOPs) with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals to improve the capability of detecting GNSS and SOP measurement faults and provide tight protection level (PL) bounds. A receiver is assumed to make pseudorange measurements on multiple GNSS satellites and terrestrial SOPs. Experimental tests are presented injecting simulated faults into the OARAIM algorithm, which successfully detects the faults in GPS satellites and SOPs. Moreover, the OARAIM algorithm and the inclusion of the SOPs reduces the vertical and horizontal PLs by more than 55% and 70%, respectively, compared to only using GNSS measurements.

DP-Authentication: A novel deep learning based drone pilot authentication scheme

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have recently been proposed as flying base stations for providing reliable service to IoT devices. However, due to the lack of effective authentication schemes, UAVs are often hijacked by adversaries, which raises a high potential for sensitive information leakage. Therefore, designing a real-time authentication scheme is essential to enhance UAV safety. Up to the present, several works exist about pilot authentication by classifying radio-control signals. As propagating through the open environment, radio-control signals can be sniffed, analyzed, and simulated, posing significant threats to UAV security. For this reason, we propose a novel deep learning-based drone pilot authentication scheme, DP-Authentication, to protect UAVs from malicious radio-manipulated attacks. Specifically, we collect UAV flight data from the onboard PX4 flight stack and feed them into the authentication scheme to validate pilot legal status dynamically. As verified by comprehensive experiments, the proposed authentication scheme can authenticate pilots with an accuracy of 95.24% and detect malicious hijacking with an accuracy of 96.82%. Thanks to the low system overhead, it holds great promise for deployment on the UAV side to monitor pilot legal status in real-time.

A Review of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Applications in Construction Management: 2016–2021

With the rapid advancement of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technologies in recent years, their uses have been increasingly adopted in the architecture, engineering, and construction industries. To satisfy the needs of various types of construction projects, a considerable amount of research work has been performed to implement and refine the operations, safety, and accuracy of UAVs. This paper presents the findings of a comprehensive literature review that focuses on UAV research in construction management during the timeframe of 2016 to 2021. A total of 95 papers were identified and collected from a list of 21 relevant journals and conference proceedings, and were then categorized by their research topic, sensor types, and targeted structures. The results of 47 exemplary studies were reported in two categories, namely UAV uses and construction uses. The research topics identified for UAV uses include algorithm, applications, operations, framework, and training, while research topics identified for construction use include inspection, surveying, safety, and monitoring. The connection between the research topics, sensor types, targeted structures, and other advanced technologies were also discussed. This paper summarizes the current results of UAV research in construction management, reviews the methodology, benefits, and limitations of the reviewed literature, and provides valuable knowledge for the future trend of UAV applications in the civil, infrastructure, and construction industries.

UAV Abnormal State Detection Model Based on Timestamp Slice and Multi-Separable CNN

With the rapid development of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), abnormal state detection has become a critical technology to ensure the flight safety of UAVs. The position and orientation system (POS) data, etc., used to evaluate UAV flight status are from different sensors. The traditional abnormal state detection model ignores the difference of POS data in the frequency domain during feature learning, which leads to the loss of key feature information and limits the further improvement of detection performance. To deal with this and improve UAV flight safety, this paper presents a method for detecting the abnormal state of a UAV based on a timestamp slice and multi-separable convolutional neural network (TS-MSCNN). Firstly, TS-MSCNN divides the POS data reasonably in the time domain by setting a set of specific timestamps and then extracts and fuses the key features to avoid the loss of feature information. Secondly, TS-MSCNN converts these feature data into grayscale images by data reconstruction. Lastly, TS-MSCNN utilizes a multi-separable convolution neural network (MSCNN) to learn key features more effectively. The binary and multi-classification experiments conducted on the real flight data, Air Lab Fault and Anomaly (ALFA), demonstrate that the TS-MSCNN outperforms traditional machine learning (ML) and the latest deep learning methods in terms of accuracy.

Inspection Route Optimization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in the Presence of Electrical Field around the Overhead Line

Planning of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) route is vital for quality of the image acquisition and the safety of UAVs in the inspection of overhead lines (OHLs). However, the influence of the electrical field generated by OHLs on the UAV inspection route was not taken into consideration in previous efforts. In this paper, an optimal route planning method is proposed to avoid UAVs flying too close to OHLs. The results in simulation shows that the UAV keep safe distance with the OHLs.

Unmanned aerial vehicle strike on a flat plate: Tests and numerical simulations

The incursion of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into airports often occurs due to the popularity of drones, which may lead to a threat to aircraft flight safety. Therefore, estimating the dynamic impact load caused by drone strikes is essential. This paper proposes a test method with high precision and low cost involving launching of a UAV to impact a flat plate specimen by using an air gun. The test results of UAVs impacting flat plates at different impact velocities, such as the UAV damage deformation captured by a high-speed camera and strain vs time dynamic response curves of plates, were obtained and analysed. At the same time, a corresponding numerical simulation was carried out by using the explicit finite element software LS-DYNA. The predicted damage to the UAV and strain on the flat plate during the strike process were compared with the test results. The overall trend of the simulation results is in good agreement with the test results, at least for the first three milliseconds of the event. This shows that the numerical simulation model established in this paper is reasonable. The UAV numerical method established in the present paper can be used to carry out numerical simulations and evaluations of the collision safety of UAVs against large aircraft and high-value ground targets. The results show that the local deformation of the impacted target is uneven due to the distribution of concentrated mass components such as motors, battery, and camera. As the impact velocity of the UAV increases, all parts of the UAV are seriously damaged and basically in a fragmented state, and the battery is greatly deformed. The interaction between the UAV and the flat plate specimen is approximately 2.7 ms, and the UAV numerical simulation model established in this paper can well simulate the real UAV impact process.

An Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Approach for Multirotor UAVs Based on Deep Neural Network of Multi-Resolution Transform Features

As a modern technological trend, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are extensively employed in various applications. The core purpose of condition monitoring systems, proactive fault diagnosis, is essential in ensuring UAV safety in these applications. In this research, adaptive health monitoring systems perform blade balancing fault diagnosis and classification. There seems to be a bidirectional unpredictability within each, and this paper proposes a hybrid-based transformed discrete wavelet and a multi-hidden-layer deep neural network (DNN) scheme to compensate for it. Wide-scale, high-quality, and comprehensive soft-labeled data are extracted from a selected hovering quad-copter incorporated with an accelerometer sensor via experimental work. A data-driven intelligent diagnostic strategy was investigated. Statistical characteristics of non-stationary six-leveled multi-resolution analysis in three axes are acquired. Two important feature selection methods were adopted to minimize computing time and improve classification accuracy when progressed into an artificial intelligence (AI) model for fault diagnosis. The suggested approach offers exceptional potential: the fault detection system identifies and predicts faults accurately as the resulting 91% classification accuracy exceeds current state-of-the-art fault diagnosis strategies. The proposed model demonstrated operational applicability on any multirotor UAV of choice.

Integer Ambiguity Parameter Identification for Fast Satellite Positioning and Navigation Based on LAMBDA-GWO with Tikhonov Regularization

Satellite positioning is one of the main navigation technologies in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the accuracy of which has an important impact on the safety, stability, and flexibility of UAVs. The parameters of integer ambiguity are important factors affecting the accuracy of satellite positioning. However, the accuracy of the integer ambiguity cannot be guaranteed when only a few epoch data can be obtained in the fast positioning such that the identification matrix of the integer ambiguity parameters is seriously ill-conditioned and the information of position deviation is enlarged. In this paper, an error checking and correcting strategy is proposed, where a Least-square Ambiguity Decorrelation Adjustment-Grey Wolf Optimization (LAMBDA-GWO) Method combined with the Tikhonov regularization method is developed to improve the accuracy of integer ambiguity for fast satellite positioning. More specifically, the LAMBDA-GWO is first used to search the integer ambiguity parameters. To reduce the ill-condition of the integer ambiguity parameter identification matrix, the Tikhonov regularization method is introduced to regularize the identification matrix such that a reliable integer ambiguity floating-point solution can be obtained. Furthermore, the correctness of the integer ambiguity is checked according to the prior accuracy information of the initial coordinates and the Total Electron Content (TEC), and the part that fails the test is corrected by the Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) Method. Finally, experimental studies based on a 522 m baseline and a 975 m baseline show that the identification success rates of the proposed method are both above 99%, which is 12% and 23% higher than that of traditional LAMBDA, respectively.

Anomaly Detection of UAV State Data Based on Single-Class Triangular Global Alignment Kernel Extreme Learning Machine

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely used and meet many demands in military and civilian fields. With the continuous enrichment and extensive expansion of application scenarios, the safety of UAVs is constantly being challenged. To address this challenge, we propose algorithms to detect anomalous data collected from drones to improve drone safety. We deployed a one-class kernel extreme learning machine (OCKELM) to detect anomalies in drone data. By default, OCKELM uses the radial basis (RBF) kernel function as the kernel function of the model. To improve the performance of OCKELM, we choose a Triangular Global Alignment Kernel (TGAK) instead of an RBF Kernel and introduce the Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA) algorithm to reconstruct UAV data. Based on the above improvements, we create a novel anomaly detection strategy FastICA-TGAK-OCELM. The method is finally validated on the UCI dataset and detected on the Aeronautical Laboratory Failures and Anomalies (ALFA) dataset. The experimental results show that compared with other methods, the accuracy of this method is improved by more than 30%, and point anomalies are effectively detected.

Research and Application of 5G Remote Control UAV with Aerial Electronic Fence

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are often out of control, lost, and crashed during use. The research of a 5G remote control UAV with an aerial electronic fence can solve these problems. The integrated application of 5G communication technology, Internet of Things technology, and electronic fence technology built through the GPS navigation cloud platform enables UAVs to achieve remote real-time control and electronic fence protection in the air through 5G. At the same time, UAVs can also achieve remote control, data transmission, image transmission, and other functions, so that UAVs can automatically and safely return in case of out-of-control failure, broaden the flight radius of UAVs, and improve the safety of UAVs.

ATSUKF-Based Actuator Health Assessment Method for Quad-Copter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The actuator, which generally consists of motors, electrical regulations, and propellers, is the key component of the quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. During the operation of the UAV, actuators are prone to degrade performance and even cause serious failure, which affects the service quality and flight safety of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Therefore, timely and accurate monitoring and evaluation of the health condition of actuators is of great significance to ensure the mission reliability of UAVs. This paper proposes an Adaptive Two-stage Unscented Kalman Filter-based actuator health assessment method for Quadcopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Firstly, a state space equation is established based on dynamic analysis to characterize the degradation mechanism of the actuator. Then, by modifying the Two-stage Unscented Kalman Filter algorithm, the Adaptive Two-stage Unscented Kalman Filter algorithm is constructed by combining the filter divergence criterion and the covariance matching technique to implement the health assessment of actuators. Finally, experiments are carried out for different degradation scenarios to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The Impact of Nonlinear Mobility Models on Straight Line Conflict Detection Algorithm for UAVs

Conflict detection is an essential issue in flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) to ensure the safety of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during flights. This paper assesses the applicability and utilization of a conflict detection algorithm that sees immediate trajectory as a straight line for short periods with nonlinear mobility models such as Gauss–Markov (GM). First, we use a straight line conflict detection algorithm with two nonlinear mobility models. Then, we perform an extensive simulation study to evaluate the performance. Additionally, we present a comprehensive discussion to tune the collision detection parameters efficiently. Simulation results indicate that an algorithm considering the immediate trajectory as a straight line to predict conflicts between UAVs can be applied with nonlinear mobilities and can provide an acceptable performance measured in false and missed alarms.