In the past decade, there has been a tendency to design and fabricate drones which can perform planetary exploration. Generally, there are various ways to study space objects, such as the application ...of telescopes and satellites, launching robots and rovers, and sending astronauts to the targeted solar bodies. However, due to the advantages of drones compared to other approaches in planetary exploration, ample research has been carried out by different space agencies in the world, including NASA to apply drones in other solar bodies. In this review paper, several studies which have been performed on space drones for planetary exploration are consolidated and discussed. Design and fabrication challenges of space drones, existing methods for their flight tests, different methods for deployment and planet entry, and various navigation and control approaches are reviewed and discussed elaborately. Limitations of applying space drones, proposed solutions for future space drones, and recommendations are also presented and discussed.
Accurate detection of individual animals is integral to the management of vulnerable wildlife species, but often difficult and costly to achieve for species that occur over wide or inaccessible areas ...or engage in cryptic behaviours. There is a growing acceptance of the use of drones (also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs and remotely piloted aircraft systems, RPAS) to detect wildlife, largely because of the capacity for drones to rapidly cover large areas compared to ground survey methods. While drones can aid the capture of large amounts of imagery, detection requires either manual evaluation of the imagery or automated detection using machine learning algorithms. While manual evaluation of drone‐acquired imagery is possible and sometimes necessary, the powerful combination of drones with automated detection of wildlife in this imagery is much faster and, in some cases, more accurate than using human observers. Despite the great potential of this emerging approach, most attention to date has been paid to the development of algorithms, and little is known about the constraints around successful detection (P. W. J. Baxter, and G. Hamilton, 2018, Ecosphere, 9, e02194).
We reviewed studies that were conducted over the last 5 years in which wildlife species were detected automatically in drone‐acquired imagery to understand how technological constraints, environmental conditions and ecological traits of target species impact detection with automated methods.
From this review, we found that automated detection could be achieved for a wider range of species and under a greater variety of environmental conditions than reported in previous reviews of automated and manual detection in drone‐acquired imagery. A high probability of automated detection could be achieved efficiently using fixed‐wing platforms and RGB sensors for species that were large and occurred in open and homogeneous environments with little vegetation or variation in topography while infrared sensors and multirotor platforms were necessary to successfully detect small, elusive species in complex habitats.
The insight gained in this review could allow conservation managers to use drones and machine learning algorithms more accurately and efficiently to conduct abundance data on vulnerable populations that is critical to their conservation.
Internet of Drones (IoD), designed to coordinate the access of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), is a specific application of the Internet of Things (IoT). Drones are used to control airspace and ...offer services such as rescue, traffic surveillance, environmental monitoring, delivery and so on. However, IoD continues to suffer from privacy and security issues. Firstly, messages are transmitted over public channels in IoD environments, which compromises data security. Further, sensitive data can also be extracted from stolen mobile devices of remote users. Moreover, drones are susceptible to physical capture and manipulation by adversaries, which are called drone capture attacks. Thus, the development of a secure and lightweight authentication scheme is essential to overcoming these security vulnerabilities, even on resource-constrained drones. In 2021, Akram et al. proposed a secure and lightweight user-drone authentication scheme for drone networks. However, we discovered that Akram et al.'s scheme is susceptible to user and drone impersonation, verification table leakage, and denial of service (DoS) attacks. Furthermore, their scheme cannot provide perfect forward secrecy. To overcome the aforementioned security vulnerabilities, we propose a secure mutual authentication and key agreement scheme between user and drone pairs. The proposed scheme utilizes physical unclonable function (PUF) to give drones uniqueness and resistance against drone stolen attacks. Moreover, the proposed scheme uses a fuzzy extractor to utilize the biometrics of users as secret parameters. We analyze the security of the proposed scheme using informal security analysis, Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, a Real-or-Random (RoR) model, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation. We also compared the security features and performance of the proposed scheme and the existing related schemes. Therefore, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme is suitable for IoD environments that can provide users with secure and convenient wireless communications.
This article focuses on monitoring of a moving disaster area using aerial drones. The aim is to navigate a network of drones to the frontier of the disaster area so that they are able to monitor the ...faster moving segment of the frontier. A computationally simple sliding-mode control algorithm for navigation of drones is developed. It is proved that the proposed algorithm tracks the moving frontier of the disaster area and achieves the global maximum in the considered optimization problem. Simulations with real bushfire images are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
PurposeThe purpose of this research is to reveal consumer preferences towards innovative last-mile parcel delivery and more specifically unmanned aerial delivery drones, in comparison to traditional ...postal delivery (postie) and the recent rise of parcel lockers in Australia. The authors investigate competitive priorities and willingness to pay for key attributes of parcel delivery (mode, speed, method and time window), the role of contextual moderators such as parcel value and security and opportunities for logistics service providers in the growing e-commerce market.Design/methodology/approachA survey involving stated choice experiments has been conducted among 709 respondents in urban Australia. The authors estimated panel error component logit models, derived consumer priorities and deployed 576 Monte Carlo simulations to forecast potential delivery mode market shares.FindingsThe study results suggest that people prefer postie over drone delivery, all else equal, but that drone deliveries become competitive with large market shares if they live up to the premise that they can deliver faster and cheaper. Both drone and postie become less attractive relative to parcel lockers when there is no safe place to leave a parcel at a residence, highlighting the importance of situational context and infrastructure at the receiving end of last-mile delivery. The authors identified opportunities for chargeable add-on services, such as signature for postie and 2-h parcel deliveries for drones.Originality/valueThe authors offer timely and novel insights into consumers preferences towards aerial drone parcel deliveries compared to postie and lockers. Going beyond the extant engineering/operations research literature, the authors provide a starting point and add new dimensions/moderators for last-mile parcel delivery choice analysis and empirical evidence of market potential and competitive attributes of innovative versus traditional parcel delivery alternatives.
With the continuous miniaturization of sensors and processors and ubiquitous wireless connectivity, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also referred to as drones, are finding many new uses in enhancing ...our life and paving the way to the realization of Internet of Drones (IoD). In the IoD, a myriad of multisized and heterogeneous drones seamlessly interact with Zone Service Providers (ZSPs) to achieve the goal of assisting drones in accessing controlled airspace and providing navigation services. However, due to the high mobility of drones and the limited communication bandwidth between drones and ZSP, service scheduling becomes a critical issue when a set of drones wants to upload/download data to/from ZSP. In this article, we propose a priority-based service scheduling scheme, also named <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">Psched</tex-math></inline-formula>, to provide efficient data upload/download service at ZSP in the IoD. The basic idea is that the <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">Psched</tex-math></inline-formula> objectively and equitably assigns a weight to multiple service scheduling parameters based on multiattribute decision making theory, calculates the serving priority of each service request group, and then serves the service request groups based on the calculated serving priority accordingly. In addition, the <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">Psched</tex-math></inline-formula> takes into account of bandwidth competition between upload and download service requests, and provides a service request balancing to achieve the maximum benefits of service scheduling scheme. In the experimental study, we choose request deadline, data size, and data popularity as service scheduling parameters, and conduct extensive simulation experiments using OMNeT++ for performance evaluation and comparison. The simulation results show that the proposed priority-based service scheduling scheme can not only increase service ratio but also can improve fresh data service ratio and average request serving latency, indicating a viable and efficient approach for satisfying service requests at ZSP in the IoD.
The continuous innovation and progression in hardware, software and communication technologies helped the expansion and accelerated growth in Internet of Things based drone networks (IoD), for the ...devices, applications and people to communicate and share data. IoD can enhance comfort in many applications including, daily life, commercial, and military/rescue operations in smart cities. However, this growth in infrastructure smartness is also subject to new security threats and the countermeasures require new customized solutions for IoD. Many schemes to secure IoD environments are proposed recently; however, some of those were proved as insecure and some degrades the efficiency. In this article, using elliptic curve cryptography, we proposed a new authentication scheme to secure the communication between a user and a drone flying in some specific flying zone. The security of the proposed scheme is solicited using formal Random oracle method along with a brief discussion on security aspects provided by proposed scheme. Finally, the comparisons with some related and latest schemes is illustrated.
A promising new delivery model involves the use of a delivery truck that collaborates with a drone to make deliveries. Effectively combining a truck and a drone gives rise to a new planning problem ...that is known as the traveling salesman problem with drone (TSP‐D). This paper presents exact solution approaches for the TSP‐D based on dynamic programming and provides an experimental comparison of these approaches. Our numerical experiments show that our approach can solve larger problems than the mathematical programming approaches that have been presented in the literature thus far. Moreover, we show that restrictions on the number of locations the truck can visit while the drone is away can help significantly reduce the solution times while having relatively little impact on the overall solution quality.
The use of drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in commercial applications has the potential to dramatically alter several industries, and, in the process, change our attitudes and behaviors ...regarding their impact on our daily lives. The emergence of drones challenges traditional notions of safety, security, privacy, ownership, liability, and regulation. With their ability to collect data and transport loads, drones are re-shaping the way we think and feel about our physical environment. However, they also burdened with the perception as being surveillance equipment, and their commercial use has been criticizied by both individuals and activist organizations. In parallel, drones have been legitimized by regulations and licenses from federal agencies, are used by companies for surveying, inspecting, and imaging, and their technological development are driven by active communities of hobbyists and enthusiasts. This tension presents unique challenges to their integration in the currently existing public, governmental and private infrastructure. In this paper, we will take a look at a few of these issues to understand how drones influence society, and present reccomendations for practitioners, policy makers, and reseachers studying this phenomenon.
•Impact of commercial drones.•Adoption of drones and the challenges to safety, security, privacy, ownership, liability, and regulation.•Integration of commercial drones to existing public, governmental and private infrastructure.