Applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Geosciences

An invaluable addition to the literature on UAV guidance and cooperative control, Cooperative Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is a dedicated, practical guide to computational path planning for UAVs. One of the key issues facing future development of UAVs is path planning: it is vital that swarm UAVs/ MAVs can cooperate together in a coordinated manner, obeying a pre-planned course but able to react to their environment by communicating and cooperating. An optimized path is necessary in order to ensure a UAV completes its mission efficiently, safely, and successfully.

This comprehensive book deeply discusses the theoretical and technical issues of unmanned aerial vehicles for deployment by industries and civil authorities in Internet of Things (IoT) systems.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has become one of the rapidly growing areas of technology, with widespread applications covering various domains. UAVs play a very important role in delivering Internet of Things (IoT) services in small and low-power devices such as sensors, cameras, GPS receivers, etc. These devices are energy-constrained and are unable to communicate over long distances. The UAVs work dynamically for IoT applications in which they collect data and transmit it to other devices that are out of communication range. Furthermore, the benefits of the UAV include deployment at remote locations, the ability to carry flexible payloads, reprogrammability during tasks, and the ability to sense for anything from anywhere. Using IoT technologies, a UAV may be observed as a terminal device connected with the ubiquitous network, where many other UAVs are communicating, navigating, controlling, and surveilling in real time and beyond line-of-sight.

Over the last ten years, the numbers of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) or “drones” have changed from being just a few specialist systems, used for scientific data gathering and military purposes, to them proliferating in huge numbers. They are used across a broad range of different leisure, commercial and military activities. UAVs can be used for: movement of items in factories for manufacturing, passenger and freight transportation, can take various roles in the agriculture and forestry industries (dispensing seeds, watering and monitoring crops), remote sensing for the oil and gas industries, traffic flow monitoring, support of emergency services, hobbies, security, military and many other applications.

Control of Autonomous Aerial Vehicles is an edited book that provides a single-volume snapshot on the state of the art in the field of control theory applied to the design of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aka “drones”, employed in a variety of applications. The homogeneous structure allows the reader to transition seamlessly through results in guidance, navigation, and control of UAVs, according to the canonical classification of the main components of a UAV’s autopilot.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer an incomparable means of gathering intelligence and carrying out missions without needing an onboard human pilot. The benefits are considerable in terms of cost, efficiency, and reduced pilot risk.