This paper provides a brief overview on the recent advances of small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from the perspective of platforms, key elements, and scientific research. The survey starts with an introduction of the recent advances of small-scale UAV platforms, based on the information summarized from 132 models available worldwide. Next, the evolvement of the key elements, including...

This paper presents the ground control station developed for a platform composed by multiple unmanned aerial vehicles in surveillance missions. The software application is fully based on open source libraries and it has been designed as a robust and decentralized system. It allows the operator to dynamically allocate different tasks to the UAVs and to show their operational information in a 3D ...

Traffic collision avoidance systems (TCAS) are used in order to avoid incidences of mid-air collisions between aircraft. We present a game-theoretic approach of a TCAS designed for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A variant of the canonical example of game-theoretic learning, fictitious play, is used as a coordination mechanism between the UAVs, that should choose between the alterna...

A fuzzy logic resource allocation algorithm that enables a collection of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to automatically cooperate will be discussed. The goal of the UAVs’ coordinated effort is to measure the atmospheric index of refraction. Once in flight no human intervention is required. A fuzzy logic based planning algorithm determines the optimal trajectory and points each UAV will sample...

Roadside counts are commonly used to assess songbird abundance, but they result in oversampling habitat edges and underrepresenting core habitats, areas of steep terrain, and wetlands. Accessing off-road habitats can be logistical challenging and time-consuming, resulting in low survey efficiency. Aerial ecological surveys, using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) have already proven to...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used for mapping in the close range domain, combining aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry and as alternative for aerial mapping technologies in small scale areas. At the current state mainly lowcost UAVs are used in mapping projects with low budgets. However, in the last years low-cost UAVs reached a level of practical reliability and professionalism whi...

Establishing and maintaining effective wireless communication networks is a major challenge for large-scale multi-agent applications in outdoor environments, such as future military operations and disaster response teams. In these applications, agents often do not have access to established communication infrastructure, and so must rely on an ad hoc network to meet their communication needs. Li...

Usage of ground, air and underwater unmanned vehicles (UGV, UAV and UUV) has increased exponentially in the recent past with industries producing thousands of these unmanned vehicles every year. With the ongoing discussion of integration of UAVs in the US National Airspace, the need of a cost-effective way to verify the security and resilience of a group of communicating UAVs under attack has b...