Review: Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as Mobile Sensing Platforms (MSPs) for Disaster Response, Civil Security and Public Safety

Abstract

The use of UAVs in areas ranging from agriculture over urban services to entertainment or simply as a hobby has rapidly grown over the last years. Regarding serious/commercial applications, UAVs have been considered in the literature, especially as mobile sensing/actuation platforms (i.e., as a delivery platform for an increasingly wide range of sensors and actuators). With regard to timely, cost-effective and very rich data acquisition, both, NEC Research as well as TNO are pursuing investigations into the use of UAVs and swarms of UAVs for scenarios where high-resolution requirements, prohibiting environments or tight time constraints render traditional approaches ineffective. In this review article, we provide a brief overview of safety and security-focused application areas that we identified as main targets for industrial and commercial projects, especially in the context of intelligent autonomous systems and autonomous/semi-autonomously operating swarms. We discuss a number of challenges related to the deployment of UAVs in general and to their deployment within the identified application areas in particular. As such, this article is meant to serve as a review and overview of the literature and the state-of-the-art, but also to offer an outlook over our possible (near-term) future work and the challenges that we will face there.

Nature-Inspired Drone Swarming for Real-Time Aerial Data-Collection Under Dynamic Operational Constraints

“…In Reference [6], we provided an overview over some of the most promising non-military application areas and the challenges of operating UAVs and especially swarms of UAVs. The United States Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) distinguishes more than twenty unique UAV mission types [12], ranging from intelligence, surveillance [21] and reconnaissance missions [5], over locating victims [11] to, for example, fire fighting [9].…”

“…The United States Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) distinguishes more than twenty unique UAV mission types [12], ranging from intelligence, surveillance [21] and reconnaissance missions [5], over locating victims [11] to, for example, fire fighting [9]. The majority of the applications in Reference [6] are sensing focused missions (as opposed to applications requiring actuation, that is, the manipulation of objects in the physical environment). In the context of the article at hand we would like to emphasis 4 main application areas where UAVs are already used for various data-collection/sensing centered missions.…”

“…While this technology is not new ( [5], reports on the U.S. military using UAVs for operations as far back as the Vietnam War) it has recently (in the last 5-10 years) become commercially available to civilian professional users as well as hobbyists. There are already a large number of diverse devices and different device types commercially available and the difference in price can be substantial between them [6], with toys being available for less than $100 while professional non-military devices can easily cost in excess of $100,000 [7]. Recent developments have resulted in UAVs with acceptable performance becoming available at an affordable cost.…”

Autonomous Airborne 3D SAR Imaging System for Subsurface Sensing: UWB-GPR on Board a UAV for Landmine and IED Detection

“…In the last years, there has been a massive development of new applications using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) [1][2][3][4]. A considerable amount of these applications is based on integrating electromagnetic sensors on board the UAVs (e.g., power detectors for antenna measurement [5], or radars for earth observation [6] and subsurface sensing [7]).…”

Compact Switched-Beam Array Antenna with a Butler Matrix and a Folded Ground Structure

“…In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have played a critical role in various technical fields, such as warfare systems, security and surveillance, structural health monitoring, unmanned delivery, agricultural applications, and communication applications [1][2][3][4][5]. Typically, drones have been used widely more than ever in a variety of industries, with the increasing demand for drone-based sensors and radars, drone-based aerial base stations, autonomous drones for emergency response, and so on [6][7][8][9][10]. Since UAV applications, including drones, require a compact antenna system due to their weight limit, an optimal antenna structure for UAVs must be studied.…”