Ebook: Modern Technologies Enabling Safe and Secure UAV Operation in Urban Airspace

The market of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is rapidly emerging and it is important to be up-to-date with all dynamic technological, legal and commercial developments related to this domain. This is why we positively replied to the proposal of organizing a NATO event dedicated to this topic. I am glad to highlight that this was already the second time we hosted at Universiapolis the Advanced Training Course organized in the framework of the NATO Science for Peace and Security research programme.

The event entitled “Modern technologies enabling safe and secure UAV operation in urban airspace” had the aim of creating an enhanced awareness among all NATO and Partner Countries about the safety and security challenges that concern UAV flights in urban airspace. The main idea of the training was to share knowledge and know-how between the specialists who are actively advancing UAV technologies and UAV capabilities that in turn help to advance safety and security across NATO and Partner Countries. Various countries have different UAV innovation and deployment experiences, which is why such a course was required for joint and uniform efforts to enhance UAVs safety and security operations in NATO and Partner Countries.

The event begun with an overall presentation about the state of the art for UAV technologies. Then, the speakers paid attention to technological features that might be a threat for flight safety in commercial or military airspace applications. The main discussion about UAV systems focused on two aspects: development and deployment.

The ATC event was designed to facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation in NATO and Partner Countries on issues of common interest, including international efforts to develop new solutions and to prepare people to welcome the world of drones. The participants were experienced scientists and industry engineers from NATO and Partner countries, involved in activity of the UAVs. We trust that this ATC NATO workshop served as the ideal forum for all those gathered experts to build an efficient network for future.

We are happy we hosted the event on Moroccan soil and I do believe all participants keep good memories of the time spent in Agadir.

Dr. Ilias Majdouline

Director of The Polytechnic School of Agadir

Vice-president of Universiapolis

The change in the nature of armed conflicts forced a change in the way they were conducted and the need to develop new types of weapons. The article presents the basic assumptions regarding the use and development prospects of unmanned flying systems. Tactical and technical data of the leading structures are presented. At the same time, the directions of development and use of combat air systems in future armed conflicts were presented. It was pointed out that unmanned aerial systems, the use of which brings significant financial benefits, are the type of weapon that has recently been gaining in importance in the most spectacular way, transforming the face of armed conflicts. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles as part of training tasks and combat missions forces the continuous development of personnel in the field of skills related to hazard identification and assessment. This process requires professionals with a high level of substantive preparation and extensive aviation experience, who will increase the awareness of RPA operators in terms of the essence and the need to analyze and estimate risk. On the basis of analyzes and comparisons, the authors proposed that the development work and the construction of elements and the system (CUAS) to combat UAV become an opportunity for the development of national research institutes and the defense industry, and also Polish export product.

Recently, collapsed bridges, belonging to infrastructure networks, evidence the needs of reliable monitoring and inspection routines. Inspections can be a challenge operation in sites difficult to access; specially trained staff like industrial climbers perform the inspection routine, eventually involving large under-bridge units, elevating platforms, or other specialized equipment. In addition, since the inspections are performed manually, the outcomes mainly rely on inspector confidence and experience. This paper discuss the possibility of using unmanned aerial vehicles for monitoring and inspection of transport infrastructure.

Academic science, research and technology companies are currently working intensively on the possibilities of using cutting-edge information and communication technologies in practice. An example of the much-needed deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is energy. This sector of the national economy requires the monitoring of large line and area objects at regular intervals in order to analyse the state of wear and damage of energy equipment. The Slovak Republic, as a modern European country, is working very intensively on the implementation of all available modern technologies in the energy sector. The text of the chapter aims to present and describe the current state of practical use of drones in the energy infrastructure in Slovakia.

The article presents an idea for a system taking autonomous navigation decisions. First, the structure of a UAV control system is described. Next, the idea for an autonomous navigation decision system is shown. Algorithms are based on the multi-criteria decision-making system. Possible faults are defined, and they are taken into consideration in the decision-making process. To illustrate the idea simulation results are shown.

In the last decade, the potential of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) has generated an enormous interest in this technology and numerous applications have therefore been proposed in military and civilian fields. More recently, researchers have begun to work on a new and miniaturized generation called Flapping Wing Nano Aerial Vehicles (FWNAVs) who could be particularly promising for the indoor inspection. Before to be able to use efficiently these FWNAVs, there are however significant scientific and technical challenges to solve due to the scaling down. These include aerodynamics of low Reynolds number flow, small-scale power generation and power storage, navigation and communication, propulsion and control as well as manufacturability. This paper sets out the potential applications of such FWNAVs and reviews some of the challenges related to aerodynamics, stability, and design trends.

The latest decade witness an unprecedented development of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), as well as for the infrastructure necessary to integrate these items into the societal life. There are several millions of UAVs ranging from large size for military applications, to small dimensions used for commercial purpose and all of them are waiting for the moment when our society would be able to integrate them in a controlled manner in our life. This chapter presents several possible technologies to unique identify the UAVs and thus to create the proper environment for proper register and monitor them.

Transforming basic multi-disciplinary research into applied research in the area of a new generation of networks, sensors, cyber-physical, and edge-cloud systems used for cyber space is a difficult task. However, moving even a step forward by providing advanced field and testing facilities for ground-air demonstrations for appearing Aviation 4.0 scenarios is a real challenge. In our opinion, such a rapid and dynamic process should be powered by many research and infrastructure projects. New development strategies are needed in the upcoming future to link emerging trends in information and communications technologies together with increased competitiveness and users expectations from fully autonomous drones, robots, cars, etc. This paper aims to share our early experiences in setting and providing distributed testbeds to cross different hardware, software, and cyber-physical components and pave the way for air-ground demonstrations of the new emerging IT paradigm – digital continuum. We also share our vision of implementing virtual and digital spaces at a large scale by the gradual transition towards higher levels of cyber-physical systems automation and autonomy. Finally, we promote dynamic, data-driven, service-oriented approaches and network-centric platforms for a new generation of air and ground control systems which will be validated in real conditions established thanks to our new airfield-based laboratories used in many ongoing and future R&D projects.

The study of the factors that form the threats to the violation of the properties of the availability and integrity of aeromonitoring video information in the system of prevention and elimination of crisis situations. The direction of increasing the availability of video information based on the use of compression technology for encoding video data has been substantiated. It is shown that to eliminate the drawback associated with lowering the lower boundary of the differential polyadic space, it is necessary for the perforation technology to additionally take into account the binary mask of burst elements of the upper and lower levels. The main conceptual components of the image compression method to increase the availability of video information, based on the coding of composite numbers with a mask in a differential perforated polyadic space, have been developed. The main results of a comparative assessment of the basic component of information availability in aeromonitoring systems are presented.

The paper considers the concept of a charging station for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV, drone) fleet. The special feature of the station is its autonomy understood as independence from a constant energy source and an external module for managing its operation. It is assumed that the station gives the possibility to charge batteries of many drones simultaneously. However, the maximum number of simultaneously charged drones is limited by a temporary total charging current (i.e. there is a power limit). The paper proposes a mathematical model of charging a single drone battery. The problem of finding a schedule of charging tasks is formulated, in which the minimum time of the charging process for all drones is assumed as the optimization criterion. Searching for a solution to this problem is performed by an autonomous charging station with an appropriate computing module equipped with a Variable Speed Processor (VSP). To that end an appropriate algorithm is activated (i.e. a computational job), the execution of which consumes a certain amount of limited energy available to the charging station. In the paper we consider energy-aware execution of an implementation of an evolutionary algorithm (EA) as a computational job. The possibility of saving energy by controlling the CPU frequency of a VSP is analyzed. A characteristic feature of the processor is the non-linear relationship between the processing rate and electric power usage. According to this relationship, it turns out that slower execution of the computational job saves electrical energy consumed by the processor.

This chapter discusses the concept of using Spiking Neural Networks (SNN), i.e. 3rd generation networks for image processing in UAV vision systems. The discussion concerns the complexity of various network models and basic limitations of hardware implementations of classifiers based on such networks. This chapter provides an example of classifying objects using SNN and discusses the implementation complexity of such networks.

The rapid development and growth of UAVs as a remote sensing platforms advances in the miniaturization of instrumentation and data systems that drives new application of drones in a variety of fields and disciplines from precision agriculture to ecology, atmospheric research, and disaster response. Drones without sensors would be useless devices. Sensors are required for a proper operation of UAVs. Apart from being “eyes” of drones additional sensors can be installed on UAV platforms to gather extra information. Drone can be used to deliver sensors to area where ad-hoc Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can be created. WSN is most often set up in ad-hoc mode by means of small-size devices grouped into network nodes distributed densely over a significant area. The paper makes a concise overview of UAVs as a sensors’ platform. In the context of a hybrid UAV-WSN network a Brooks-Iyengar sensor fusion algorithm is presented.

In the paper a possibility of drones application in length and angle metrology was discussed. Some basic issues of metrology in mechanical engineering scale was presented. The use of drones for micro, meso and macro scale was briefly described. Different options and configurations were shown, including benefits and possible problems. Uncertainty issues were also discussed. From that point of view the future of drones in metrology looks bright, as it is also in other areas of human life. Due to rising labor costs, replacing a human being by a system solution is very desirable.