Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Magnetic Surveys: A Review on Platform Selection and Interference Suppression

Abstract

In the past two decades, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used in many scientific research fields for various applications. In particular, the use of UAVs for magnetic surveys has become a hot spot and is expected to be actively applied in the future. A considerable amount of literature has been published on the use of UAVs for magnetic surveys, however, how to choose the platform and reduce the interference of UAV to the collected data have not been discussed systematically. There are two primary aims of this study: (1) To ascertain the basis of UAV platform selection and (2) to investigate the characteristics and suppression methods of UAV magnetic interference. Systematic reviews were performed to summarize the results of 70 academic studies (from 2005 to 2021) and outline the research tendencies for applying UAVs in magnetic surveys. This study found that multi-rotor UAVs have become the most widely used type of UAVs in recent years because of their advantages such as easiness to operate, low cost, and the ability of flying at a very low altitude, despite their late appearance. With the improvement of the payload capacity of UAVs, to use multiple magnetometers becomes popular since it can provide more abundant information. In addition, this study also found that the most commonly used method to reduce the effects of the UAV’s magnetic interference is to increase the distance between the sensors and the UAV, although this method will bring about other problems, e.g., the directional and positional errors of sensors caused by erratic movements, the increased risk of impact to the magnetometers. The pros and cons of different types of UAV, magnetic interference characteristics and suppression methods based on traditional aeromagnetic compensation and other methods are discussed in detail. This study contributes to the classification of current UAV applications as well as the data processing methods in magnetic surveys.

A Novel Design and Implementation of an Autopilot Terrain-Following Airship

“…However, it is necessary to minimize the impact of the aircraft on magnetic sensors, as shown in work [19], [20]. In addition, as mentioned in [21], the drone has the disadvantage that it should lift the entire weight of the aircraft only with battery power, so the flight time cannot exceed 30 minutes. Furthermore, existing studies demonstrated exploration results on flat land.…”

“…To apply to magnetic exploration, due to the helium gas cost, once it is injected into the airship, it should cover a larger area than the drone to make it feasible. Also mentioned in [21], ''the unmanned airship, which can stay in the air for a long time, is suitable for carrying out medium-area magnetic surveys.'' Recently, low-power and high-performance MCUs have been emerging due to the development of SoC (System on Chip) technology.…”

Cognitive-Based High Robustness Frequency Hopping Strategy for UAV Swarms in Complex Electromagnetic Environment

“…For example, RQ-170 Sentinel UAV was captured by Iranian forces due to the interference signal on December 4, 2011 [14]. The external interference faced by UAVs can be divided into suppressed interference and deceptive interference [15]. Suppressed interference suppresses the source information by sending high-power interference, which is simple in implementation and has become a widely applied interference method recently.…”

A Novel Noise Reduction Method of UAV Magnetic Survey Data Based on CEEMDAN, Permutation Entropy, Correlation Coefficient and Wavelet Threshold Denoising

“…The past decade has seen a variety of applications conducted by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in many fields, e.g., archaeology, remote sensing, geological prospecting, and unexploded ordnance (UXO) detection [1]. Among these applications, the use of UAVs for magnetic surveys is a booming branch of research [2].…”