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The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) entered into their development stage when different applications became real. One of those application areas is agriculture. Agriculture and transport currently follow infrastructure as the top industries in the world UAV market. The agricultural UAV can be acquired as a ready-made, built by its future user or UAV-as-a-service (UaaS) way. This paper aims to help the UAVs’ users to choose the right sensors for agricultural purposes. For that sake, the overview of the types and application areas of onboard sensors is presented and discussed. Some conclusions and suggestions should allow readers to choose the proper onboard sensors set and the right way of acquiring UAVs for their purposes related to the agricultural area.

The agricultural UAVs’ onboard specialised sensors have been analysed, described and evaluated from the farmer’s operational point of view. That analysis took into consideration the agricultural UAVs’ types of missions, sensor characteristics, basics of the data processing software and the whole set of UAV-sensor-software operational features. As the conclusions, the trends in the onboard agricultural UAVs’ sensors, their applications and operational characteristics have been presented.

Services performed by the UAVs for the agriculture businesses are the second in the UAV services world market, and their growth potential is around 17% compound annual growth rate in the next years. As one of the quickest developing businesses, it will attract substantial investments in all related areas. They will be done in the research, development and market deployment stages of that technology development. The authors can expect the new business models of the equipment manufacturers, service providers and sellers of the equipment, consumables and materials. The world agricultural UAVs’ services market will be divided between the following two main streams: the UAVs’ solutions dedicated to the individual farmers, systems devoted to the companies giving the specialised services to individual farmers, in the form of UaaS. It will be followed by the two directions of the agriculture UAV set optimisation, according to each of the above streams’ specific requirements and expectations. Solutions for the individual users will be more straightforward, universal and more comfortable to operate but less effective and less accurate than systems dedicated to the agricultural service provider. UAVs are becoming important universal machines in the agriculture business. They are the newcomers in that business but can change the processes performed traditionally. Such an example is spraying the crops. UAVs spray the rice fields in Japan on at least half of them every year. The other is defoliating the cotton leaves, which only in one China province takes place on a few million hectares every year (Kurkute et al., 2018). That trend will extend the range of applications of UAVs. The agricultural UAV will take over process after process from the traditional machines. The types and number of missions and activities performed by agricultural UAVs are growing. They are strictly connected with the development of hardware and software responsible for those missions’ performance. New onboard sensors are more reliable, have better parameters and their prices are reasonable. Onboard computers and data processing and transmitting methods allow for effective solutions of automatisation and autonomy of the agricultural UAVs’ operation. Automatisation and autonomous performance of the UAVs’ agricultural missions are the main directions of the future development of that technology. Changing the UAV payload allows for its application to a different mission. Changing the payload, like effectors, is quite simple and does not require any special training or tooling. It can be done in the field during the regular operation of the agricultural UAV. Changing the sensor set can be more complicated, because of the eventually required calibrating of those sensors. The same set of sensors gives a possibility to perform a relatively broad range of missions and tasks. The universal setup consists of the multispectral and RGB camera. The agricultural UAV equipped with such a set of sensors can effectively perform most of the crop monitoring missions. The agriculture business will accept the optimised sensor-computer-software UAV payload set, where its exploitation cost and operational simplicity are the critical optimisation factors. Simplicity, reliability and effectiveness of the everyday operation are the vital factors of accepting the agricultural UAV technology as a widespread working horse.

Performed research studies have been done taking into consideration the factors influencing the real operational decisions made by the farmers or companies offering UAV services to them. In that case, e.g. the economical factors have been considered, which could prevail the technical complexity or measuring accuracy of the sensors. Then, drawn conclusions can be not accurate from the scientific research studies point of view, where the financing limits are not so strict.

The main goal of the paper is to present the reasons and factors influencing the “optimised” solution of the configuration of agricultural UAV onboard sensors set. It was done at the level useful for the readers understanding the end-users expectations and having a basic understanding of the sensors-related technologies. The paper should help them to configure an acceptable agricultural UAV for the specific missions or their servicing business.

Understanding the technology implications related to the applying of agricultural UAVs into everyday service is one of the main limits of that technology market deployment. The conclusions should allow for avoiding the misunderstanding of the agricultural UAVs’ capabilities and then increasing their social acceptance. That acceptance by the farmers is the key factor for the effective introduction of that technology into the operation.

Presented conclusions have been drawn on the base of the extensive research of the existing literature and web pages, and also on the own experience in forestry and agriculture and other technical applications of the onboard sensors. The experience in practical aspects of the sensors choosing and application into several areas have been also used, e.g. manned and unmanned aeroplanes and helicopters applied in similar and other types of missions.

The successful application of the group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the tasks of monitoring large areas is becoming a promising direction in modern robotics. This paper aims to study the tasks related to the control of the UAV group while performing a common mission.

This paper discusses the main tasks solved in the process of developing an autonomous UAV group. During the survey, five key tasks of group robotics were investigated, namely, UAV group control, path planning, reconfiguration, task assignment and conflict resolution. Effective methods for solving each problem are presented, and an analysis and comparison of these methods are carried out. Several specifics of various types of UAVs are also described.

The analysis of a number of modern and effective methods showed that decentralized methods have clear advantages over centralized ones, since decentralized methods effectively perform the assigned mission regardless of on the amount of resources used. As for the method of planning the group movement of UAVs, it is worth choosing methods that combine the algorithms of global and local planning. This combination eliminates the possibility of collisions not only with static and dynamic obstacles, but also with other agents of the group.

The results of scientific research progress in the tasks of UAV group control have been summed up.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) developments, types, the major functional components of UAV, challenges, and trends of UAVs, and among the various challenges, the authors are concentrating more on obstacle sensing methods. This also highlights the scope of on-board vision-based obstacle sensing for miniature UAVs.

The paper initially discusses the basic functional elements of UAV, then considers the different challenges faced by UAV designers. The authors have narrowed down the study on obstacle detection and sensing methods for autonomous operation.

Among the various existing obstacle sensing techniques, on-board vision-based obstacle detection has better scope in the future requirements of miniature UAVs to make it completely autonomous.

The paper gives original review points by doing a thorough literature survey on various obstacle sensing techniques used for UAVs.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a distributed task allocation method for cooperative mission planning of multiple heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based on the consensus algorithm and the online cooperative strategy.

In this paper, the allocation process is conducted in a distributed framework. The cooperative task allocation problem is proposed with constraints and uncertainties in a real mission. The algorithm based on the consensus algorithm and the online cooperative strategy is proposed for this problem. The local chain communication mode is adopted to restrict the bandwidth of the communication link among the UAVs, and two simulation tests are given to test the optimality and rapidity of the proposed algorithm.

This method can handle both continuous and discrete uncertainties in the mission space, and the proposed algorithm can obtain a feasible solution in allowable time.

This study is only applied to the case that the total number of the UAVs is less than 15.

This study is expected to be practical for a real mission with uncertain targets.

The proposed algorithm can go beyond previous works that only deal with continuous uncertainties, and the Bayesian theorem is adopted for estimation of the target.

UAVs have become a critical component of U.S. military operations, reducing the need to risk the life of a pilot, while performing tasks considered dull, dirty, and dangerous. UAVs currently are serving an important intelligence, surveillance, search, and destroy function in Operation Enduring Freedom. Since September 11, 2001, the public has increasingly been made aware of the role that military UAVs, such as the Predator and Global Hawk, play.

The purpose of this paper is to explore institutional realities and public perceptions of police use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Canada in relation to each other, drawing attention to areas of public misunderstanding and concern.

Public perceptions data are drawn from a national survey (n=3,045) of UAV use. Institutional realities data are drawn from content analyses of all Special Flight Operation Certificates issued by Transport Canada from 2007 to 2012 and flight logs of a regional service kept from 2011 to 2013. Officer interviews (n=2) also provide qualitative insights on institutional realities from this same regional service.

The data reveal disparities between institutional realities and public perceptions. Although federal, provincial and regional services currently use UAVs, awareness of police use of UAVs relative to traditionally piloted aircraft was low. Further, support for police use of UAVs was significantly lower than traditionally piloted craft; but, support also varied considerably across UAV applications, with the greatest opposition tied to tasks for which police do not report using UAVs and the greatest support tied to tasks for which police report using UAVs.

This research provides previously unknown descriptive data on the institutional realities of police use of UAVs in Canada, positioning that knowledge in relation to public perceptions of police use of the technology. The findings raise concerns over how UAVs may negatively shape police/civilian relations based on procedural justice literature which demonstrates that a lack of public support for the technology may affect the police more broadly.

Today's battlespace is a very complex system of humans and technology. It could be thought of as a system of layers – where there might be a layer of ground operations and a layer of air operations. Within the air operations layer exists two additional layers of manned air operations and unmanned air operations. If you peel back all layers of today's battlespace and just view the “unmanned air operations” layer, you will find another complex system of humans and technology working as just one element of the overall system. This system of uninhabited air operations might consist of different types of uninhabited air vehicles (e.g., Predator, Hunter, etc.) performing different types of missions (e.g., Intelligence, Reconnaissance, Surveillance-IRS; IRS-strike; search and rescue, etc.).

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are more affected by adverse wind conditions in especially landing. Therefore, they need to change the runway in use. In case of this change, to eliminate the uncertain maneuvers, there is a need for a special prescribed track. The purpose of this study is the construction of a prescribed track at a single runway to provide a facility to change the runway in use.

Two forms of prescribed tracks, as standard and alternate, were constructed for UAVs by taking into consideration the key parameters to design flight procedures. Both tracks were assessed in a real-time simulation method. Moreover, unmanned vehicle simulation was used for a validation process.

According to the real-time simulation results, 8.14 NM and 6.64 NM of flight distance and 5.43 min and 4.43 min of flight time for the standard and alternate prescribed tracks were found, respectively. The obtained results were in favor of the alternate prescribed track. Furthermore, the prescribed track was assessed and validated in both air traffic control and UAV simulations. The feedback of pilots and controllers was very positive for a prescribed track, as it provided them with foresight and time to take care in any situations.

The prescribed track in this paper may be applied by airspace designers and UAV users to perform safe and efficient landing in adverse wind conditions.

In this study, a prescribed track was constructed for UAVs. Quantitative results were achieved using a real-time simulation method in terms of flight distance and flight time. Additionally, validation of the prescribed track was achieved by unmanned air vehicle simulation.

The purpose of this study is to perform the preliminary design, flight performance and exhaust emissions calculations of a piston engine powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) during a flight cycle which consists of multiple flight altitudes and airspeeds.

A genuine computer model in Matlab/Simulink was developed to predict the size and weight of UAV and piston engine (using Avgas 100LL fuel) performance together with exhaust emissions in an iterative process.

The amount of emitted exhaust gases including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides were calculated in a typical UAV mission profile as a whole and also divided into mission flight segments.

Emissions were calculated based on fuel flow and engine speed inputs based on ground test data for emission indices. Test data for emission indices was very limited.

As UAV utilization has been increasing around the world, this study presents important and noticeable results on the emissions that need to be considered for environmental purposes.

In literature, emission prediction studies for UAVs are very rare. In fact, UAVs typically have quite different flight speeds and altitudes than regular manned aircraft and emissions change with speed and altitude. Additionally, unlike manned aircraft, UAVs can fly more than 24 h with different operation characteristics. The originality of this study presents the emission predictions of a piston engine UAV which flies with a significantly different mission profile than a manned aircraft.

The purpose of the paper is to describe the evolving regulatory structures of the civilian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in India and Japan, not yet fully developed to regulate the deployment of the UAV. India and Japan are at the forefront to overhaul the respective regulatory framework to address issues of accountability, responsibility and risks associated with the deployment of UAV technologies.

In-depth interviews are conducted both in Japan and India to gather primary data based on the snowball sampling method. The paper addresses questions such as what is the current scenario of civilian UAV deployment in India and Japan. What are the regulation structures for Civil UAV deployment and operation and how they differ in India and Japan? What are the key regulatory challenges for Civil UAV deployment in India? How regulation structure enables or inhibits the users and operators of Civil UAVs in India? What are mutual learnings concerning UAV regulations?

Findings reveal that the Indian regulations address issues of responsibility by imparting values of privacy, safety, autonomy and security; Japanese regulation prefers values of trust, responsibility, safety and ownership with more freedom to experiment.

The study on civilian UAV regulatory framework is a new and innovative work embedded by the dimensions of responsibility and accountability from a responsible innovation perspective. The work is a new contribution to innovation literature looked at from regulatory structures. Field visits to both Japan and India enrich the study to a new elevation.