No abstract

No abstract

The fast-paced development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and their use in different domains, opens a new paradigm on their use in natural disaster management. In UAV-assisted disaster management applications, UAVs not only survey the affected area but also assist in establishing the communication network between the disaster survivors, rescue teams and nearest available cellular infrastructure. This paper identifies main disaster management applications of UAV networks and discusses open research issues related to UAVassisted disaster management.

No abstract

No abstract

Air pollution monitoring has recently become an issue of utmost importance in our society. Despite the fact that crowdsensing approaches could be an adequate solution for urban areas, they cannot be implemented in rural environments. Instead, deploying a fleet of UAVs could be considered an acceptable alternative. Embracing this approach, this paper proposes the use of UAVs equipped with off-the-shelf sensors to perform air pollution monitoring tasks. These UAVs are guided by our proposed Pollution-driven UAV Control (PdUC) algorithm, which is based on a chemotaxis metaheuristic and a local particle swarm optimization strategy. Together, they allow automatically performing the monitoring of a specified area using UAVs. Experimental results show that, when using PdUC, an implicit priority guides the construction of pollution maps by focusing on areas where the pollutants' concentration is higher. This way, accurate maps can be constructed in a faster manner when compared to other strategies. The PdUC scheme is compared against various standard mobility models through simulation, showing that it achieves better performance. In particular, it is able to find the most polluted areas with more accuracy and provides a higher coverage within the time bounds defined by the UAV flight time.

International audienceIn this paper we want to explore a new approach for security mechanisms design and deployment in the context of Internet of Things (IoT). We claim that the usual approach to security issues, typical of more classical systems and networks, does not grab all the aspects related to this new paradigm of communication, sharing and actuation. In fact, the IoT paradigm involves new features, mechanisms and dangers that cannot be completely taken into consideration through the classical formulation of security problems. The IoT calls for a new paradigm of security, which will have to consider the security problem from a holistic perspective including the new actors and their interactions. In this paper, we propose a systemic approach to security in IoT and explore the role of each actor and its interactions with the other main actors of the proposed scheme

The field of structural inspection acquired a new boost with the development of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). However, the flight time of a UAV is still short compared to the time needed to perform a complete structural inspection, and therefore the reliability of a single UAV is under question. This paper presents an algorithm that allows an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) to provide continuous uninterrupted structural inspection service. MAVLink protocol is extended with a set of messages and commands that allow the implementation of the proposed algorithm. The proof-of-concept simulation and implementation on UAVs show that the algorithm is suitable for the use in multi-UAV waypoint mission dedicated to structural inspection.