Unmanned aerial vehicles towards future Industrial Internet:Roles and opportunities

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs)are gaining increasing attention in many fields,such as military,logistics,and hazardous site mapping.Utilizing UAVs to assist communications is one of the promising applications and research directions.The future Industrial Internet places higher demands on communication quality.The easy deployment,dynamic mobility,and low cost of UAVs make them a viable tool for wireless communication in the Industrial Internet.Therefore,UAVs are considered as an integral part of Industry 4.0.In this article,three typical use cases of UAVs-assisted communications in Industrial Internet are first summarized.Then,the state-of-the-art technologies for drone-assisted communication in support of the Industrial Internet are presented.According to the current research,it can be assumed that UAV-assisted communication can support the future Industrial Internet to a certain extent.Finally,the potential research directions and open challenges in UAV-assisted communications in the upcoming future Industrial Internet are discussed.

Optimization of Resource Allocation in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Swarm Intelligence Algorithms

Due to their adaptability,Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs)play an essential role in the Internet of Things(IoT).Using wireless power transfer(WPT)techniques,an UAV can be supplied with energy while in flight,thereby extending the lifetime of this energy-constrained device.This paper investigates the optimization of resource allocation in light of the fact that power transfer and data transmission cannot be performed simultaneously.In this paper,we propose an optimization strategy for the resource allocation of UAVs in sensor communication networks.It is a practical solution to the problem of marine sensor networks that are located far from shore and have limited power.A corresponding system model is summarized based on the scenario and existing theoretical works.The minimum throughputmaximizing object is then formulated as an optimization problem.As swarm intelligence algorithms are utilized effectively in numerous fields,this paper chose to solve the formed optimization problem using the Harris Hawks Optimization and Whale Optimization Algorithms.This paper introduces a method for translating multi-decisions into a row vector in order to adapt swarm intelligence algorithms to the problem,as joint time and energy optimization have two sets of variables.The proposed method performs well in terms of stability and duration.Finally,performance is evaluated through numerical experiments.Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method performs admirably in the given scenario.

3D Path Optimisation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Q Learning-Controlled GWO-AOA

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs)or drones introduced for military applications are gaining popularity in several other fields as well such as security and surveillance,due to their ability to perform repetitive and tedious tasks in hazardous environments.Their increased demand created the requirement for enabling the UAVs to traverse independently through the Three Dimensional(3D)flight environment consisting of various obstacles which have been efficiently addressed by metaheuristics in past literature.However,not a single optimization algorithms can solve all kind of optimization problem effectively.Therefore,there is dire need to integrate metaheuristic for general acceptability.To address this issue,in this paper,a novel reinforcement learning controlled Grey Wolf Optimisation-Archimedes Optimisation Algorithm(QGA)has been exhaustively introduced and exhaustively validated firstly on 22 benchmark functions and then,utilized to obtain the optimum flyable path without collision for UAVs in three dimensional environment.The performance of the developed QGA has been compared against the various metaheuristics.The simulation experimental results reveal that the QGA algorithm acquire a feasible and effective flyable path more efficiently in complicated environment.

Optimal Deep Learning Enabled Communication System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Recently,unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV)or drones are widely employed for several application areas such as surveillance,disaster management,etc.Since UAVs are limited to energy,efficient coordination between them becomes essential to optimally utilize the resources and effective communication among them and base station(BS).Therefore,clustering can be employed as an effective way of accomplishing smart communication systems among multiple UAVs.In this aspect,this paper presents a group teaching optimization algorithm with deep learning enabled smart communication system(GTOADL-SCS)technique for UAV networks.The proposed GTOADL-SCS model encompasses a two stage process namely clustering and classification.At the initial stage,the GTOADL-SCS model includes a GTOA based clustering scheme to elect cluster heads(CHs)and organize clusters.Besides,the GTOADL-SCS model develops a fitness function containing three input parameters as residual energy of UAVs,average neighoring distance,and UAV degree.For classification process,the GTOADLSCS model applies pre-trained densely connected network(DenseNet201)feature extractor with gated recurrent unit(GRU)classifier.For ensuring the enhanced performance of the GTOADL-SCS model,a widespread simulation analysis is performed and the comparative study reported the significant outcomes over the existing approaches with maximum packet delivery ratio(PDR)of 92.60%.

Rice Bacterial Infection Detection Using Ensemble Technique on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Images

Establishing a system for measuring plant health and bacterial infection is critical in agriculture.Previously,the farmers themselves,who observed them with their eyes and relied on their experience in analysis,which could have been incorrect.Plant inspection can determine which plants reflect the quantity of green light and near-infrared using infrared light,both visible and eye using a drone.The goal of this study was to create algorithms for assessing bacterial infections in rice using images from unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)with an ensemble classification technique.Convolution neural networks in unmanned aerial vehi-cles image were used.To convey this interest,the rice’s health and bacterial infec-tion inside the photo were detected.The project entailed using pictures to identify bacterial illnesses in rice.The shape and distinct characteristics of each infection were observed.Rice symptoms were defined using machine learning and image processing techniques.Two steps of a convolution neural network based on an image from a UAV were used in this study to determine whether this area will be affected by bacteria.The proposed algorithms can be utilized to classify the types of rice deceases with an accuracy rate of 89.84 percent.

Received Power Based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Jamming Detection and Nodes Classification Using Machine Learning

This paper presents a machine-learning method for detecting jamming UAVs and classifying nodes during jamming attacks onWireless Sensor Networks(WSNs).Jamming is a type of Denial of Service(DoS)attack and intentional interference where a malicious node transmits a high-power signal to increase noise on the receiver side to disrupt the communication channel and reduce performance significantly.To defend and prevent such attacks,the first step is to detect them.The current detection approaches use centralized techniques to detect jamming,where each node collects information and forwards it to the base station.As a result,overhead and communication costs increased.In this work,we present a jamming attack and classify nodes into different categories based on their location to the jammer by employing a single node observer.As a result,we introduced a machine learning model that uses distance ratios and power received as features to detect such attacks.Furthermore,we considered several types of jammers transmitting at different power levels to evaluate the proposed metrics using MATLAB.With a detection accuracy of 99.7%for the k-nearest neighbors(KNN)algorithm and average testing accuracy of 99.9%,the presented solution is capable of efficiently and accurately detecting jamming attacks in wireless sensor networks.

Modeling and Trajectory Tracking Control for Flapping-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles

This paper studies the trajectory tracking problem of flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles(FWMAVs)in the longitudinal plane.First of all,the kinematics and dynamics of the FWMAV are established,wherein the aerodynamic force and torque generated by flapping wings and the tail wing are explicitly formulated with respect to the flapping frequency of the wings and the degree of tail wing inclination.To achieve autonomous tracking,an adaptive control scheme is proposed under the hierarchical framework.Specifically,a bounded position controller with hyperbolic tangent functions is designed to produce the desired aerodynamic force,and a pitch command is extracted from the designed position controller.Next,an adaptive attitude controller is designed to track the extracted pitch command,where a radial basis function neural network is introduced to approximate the unknown aerodynamic perturbation torque.Finally,the flapping frequency of the wings and the degree of tail wing inclination are calculated from the designed position and attitude controllers,respectively.In terms of Lyapunov's direct method,it is shown that the tracking errors are bounded and ultimately converge to a small neighborhood around the origin.Simulations are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

Outage Performance of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Satellite Networks

With rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs), more and more UAVs access satellite networks for data transmission. To improve the spectral efficiency, non-orthogonal multiple access(NOMA) is adopted to integrate UAVs into the satellite network, where multiple satellites cooperatively serve the UAVs and mobile terminal using the Ku-band and above. Taking into account the rain fading and the fading correlation, the outage performance is first analytically obtained for fixed power allocation and then efficiently calculated by the proposed power allocation algorithm to guarantee the user fairness. Simulation results verify the outage performance analysis and show the performance improvement of the proposed power allocation scheme.

Automatic Carrier Landing Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Preview Control

For carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs),one of the important problems is the design of an automatic carrier landing system(ACLS)that would enable the UAVs to accomplish autolanding on the aircraft carrier.However,due to the movements of the flight deck with six degree-of-freedom,the autolanding becomes sophisticated.To solve this problem,an accurate and effective ACLS is developed,which is composed of an optimal preview control based flight control system and a Kalman filter based deck motion predictor.The preview control fuses the future information of the reference glide slope to improve landing precision.The reference glide slope is normally a straight line.However,the deck motion will change the position of the ideal landing point,and tracking the ideal straight glide slope may cause landing failure.Therefore,the predictive deck motion information from the deck motion predictor is used to correct the reference glide slope,which decreases the dispersion around the desired landing point.Finally,simulations are carried out to verify the performance of the designed ACLS based on a nonlinear UAV model.

Circular Formation Flight Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles With Directed Network and External Disturbance

This paper proposes a new distributed formation flight protocol for unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)to perform coordinated circular tracking around a set of circles on a target sphere.Different from the previous results limited in bidirectional networks and disturbance-free motions,this paper handles the circular formation flight control problem with both directed network and spatiotemporal disturbance with the knowledge of its upper bound.Distinguishing from the design of a common Lyapunov fiunction for bidirectional cases,we separately design the control for the circular tracking subsystem and the formation keeping subsystem with the circular tracking error as input.Then the whole control system is regarded as a cascade connection of these two subsystems,which is proved to be stable by input-tostate stability(ISS)theory.For the purpose of encountering the external disturbance,the backstepping technology is introduced to design the control inputs of each UAV pointing to North and Down along the special sphere(say,the circular tracking control algorithm)with the help of the switching function.Meanwhile,the distributed linear consensus protocol integrated with anther switching anti-interference item is developed to construct the control input of each UAV pointing to east along the special sphere(say,the formation keeping control law)for formation keeping.The validity of the proposed control law is proved both in the rigorous theory and through numerical simulations.

A Secure Communication Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Mavlink is a lightweight and most widely used open-source communication protocol used for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.Multiple UAVs and autopilot systems support it,and it provides bi-directional communication between the UAV and Ground Control Station.The communications contain critical information about the UAV status and basic control commands sent from GCS to UAV and UAV to GCS.In order to increase the transfer speed and efficiency,the Mavlink does not encrypt the messages.As a result,the protocol is vulnerable to various security attacks such as Eavesdropping,GPS Spoofing,and DDoS.In this study,we tackle the problem and secure the Mavlink communication protocol.By leveraging the Mavlink packet’s vulnerabilities,this research work introduces an experiment in which,first,the Mavlink packets are compromised in terms of security requirements based on our threat model.The results show that the protocol is insecure and the attacks carried out are successful.To overcomeMavlink security,an additional security layer is added to encrypt and secure the protocol.An encryption technique is proposed that makes the communication between the UAV and GCS secure.The results show that the Mavlink packets are encrypted using our technique without affecting the performance and efficiency.The results are validated in terms of transfer speed,performance,and efficiency compared to the literature solutions such as MAVSec and benchmarked with the original Mavlink protocol.Our achieved results have significant improvement over the literature and Mavlink in terms of security.

Distributed tracking control of unmanned aerial vehicles under wind disturbance and model uncertainty

A distributed robust method is developed for cooperative tracking control of unmanned aerial vehicles under unknown wind disturbance and model uncertainty. The communication network among vehicles is a directed graph with switching topology. Each vehicle can only share its states with its neighbors. Dynamics of the vehicles are nonlinear and affected by the wind disturbance and model uncertainty. Feedback linearization is adopted to transform the dynamics of vehicles into linear systems. To account for the wind disturbance and model uncertainty, a robust controller is designed for each vehicle such that all vehicles ultimately synchronize to the virtual leader in the three-dimensional path. It is theoretically shown that the position states of the vehicles will converge to that of the virtual leader if the communication network has a directed spanning tree rooted at the virtual leader. Furthermore, the robust controller is extended to address the formation control problem. Simulation examples are also given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2016 Beijing Institute of Aerospace Information.

Asynchronous H_∞ Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Switched Polytopic System Approach

This study is concerned with the H∞control for the full-envelope unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of missing measurements and external disturbances. With the dramatic parameter variations in large flight envelope and the locally overlapped switching laws in flight, the system dynamics is modeled as a locally overlapped switched polytopic system to reduce designing conservatism and solving complexity. Then, considering updating lags of controller's switching signals and the weighted coefficients of the polytopic subsystems induced by missing measurements, an asynchronous H∞control method is proposed such that the system is stable and a desired disturbance attenuation level is satisfied. Furthermore, the sufficient existing conditions of the desired switched parameter-dependent H∞controller are derived in the form of linear matrix inequality (LMIs) by combining the switched parameter-dependent Lyapunov function method and average dwell time method. Finally, a numerical example based on a highly maneuverable technology (HiMAT) vehicle is given to verify the validity of the proposed method. © 2014 Chinese Association of Automation.

Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Cooperative Cluster-Based Data Collection for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In recent times,sixth generation(6G)communication technologies have become a hot research topic because of maximum throughput and low delay services for mobile users.It encompasses several heterogeneous resource and communication standard in ensuring incessant availability of service.At the same time,the development of 6G enables the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs)in offering cost and time-efficient solution to several applications like healthcare,surveillance,disaster management,etc.In UAV networks,energy efficiency and data collection are considered the major process for high quality network communication.But these procedures are found to be challenging because of maximum mobility,unstable links,dynamic topology,and energy restricted UAVs.These issues are solved by the use of artificial intelligence(AI)and energy efficient clustering techniques for UAVs in the 6G environment.With this inspiration,this work designs an artificial intelligence enabled cooperative cluster-based data collection technique for unmanned aerial vehicles(AECCDC-UAV)in 6G environment.The proposed AECCDC-UAV technique purposes for dividing the UAV network as to different clusters and allocate a cluster head(CH)to each cluster in such a way that the energy consumption(ECM)gets minimized.The presented AECCDC-UAV technique involves a quasi-oppositional shuffled shepherd optimization(QOSSO)algorithm for selecting the CHs and construct clusters.The QOSSO algorithm derives a fitness function involving three input parameters residual energy of UAVs,distance to neighboring UAVs,and degree of UAVs.The performance of the AECCDC-UAV technique is validated in many aspects and the obtained experimental values demonstration promising results over the recent state of art methods.

Guest Editorial for Special Issue on Autonomous Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

IN recent years,unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)have been widely employed in different applications,both military and civilian.Especially,a fast growing civil UAV market is predicted over the next decades.However,most currently developed UAVs depend on simple control strategy.They require exact modeling of the UAVs dynamics and are vulnerable to external disturbance.Therefore,there is great

Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based Decision Support System for Weed Management

Recently,autonomous systems become a hot research topic among industrialists and academicians due to their applicability in different domains such as healthcare,agriculture,industrial automation,etc.Among the interesting applications of autonomous systems,their applicability in agricultural sector becomes significant.Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)can be used for suitable site-specific weed management(SSWM)to improve crop productivity.In spite of substantial advancements in UAV based data collection systems,automated weed detection still remains a tedious task owing to the high resemblance of weeds to the crops.The recently developed deep learning(DL)models have exhibited effective performance in several data classification problems.In this aspect,this paper focuses on the design of autonomous UAVs with decision support system for weed management(AUAV-DSSWM)technique.The proposed AUAV-DSSWM technique intends to identify the weeds by the use of UAV images acquired from the target area.Besides,the AUAV-DSSWM technique primarily performs image acquisition and image pre-processing stages.Moreover,the Adam optimizer with You Only Look Once Object Detector-(YOLOv3)model is applied for the detection of weeds.For the effective classification of weeds and crops,the poor and rich optimization(PRO)algorithm with softmax layer is applied.The design of Adam optimizer and PRO algorithm for the parameter tuning process results in enhanced weed detection performance.A wide range of simulations take place on UAV images and the experimental results exhibit the promising performance of the AUAV-DSSWM technique over the other recent techniques with the accy of 99.23%.

IoT-Cloud Empowered Aerial Scene Classification for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Recent trends in communication technologies and unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)find its application in several areas such as healthcare,surveillance,transportation,etc.Besides,the integration of Internet of things(IoT)with cloud computing environment offers several benefits for the UAV communication.At the same time,aerial scene classification is one of the major research areas in UAV-enabledMEC systems.In UAV aerial imagery,efficient image representation is crucial for the purpose of scene classification.The existing scene classification techniques generate mid-level image features with limited representation capabilities that often end up in producing average results.Therefore,the current research work introduces a new DL-enabled aerial scene classificationmodel forUAV-enabledMECsystems.The presented model enables theUAVs to capture aerial imageswhich are then transmitted to MEC for further processing.Next,CapsuleNetwork(CapsNet)-based feature extraction technique is applied to derive a set of useful feature vectors from the aerial image.It is important to have an appropriate hyperparameter tuning strategy,since manual parameter tuning of DL model tend to produce several configuration errors.In order to achieve this and to determine the hyperparameters of CapsNetmodel,Shuffled Shepherd Optimization(SSO)algorithm is implemented.Finally,Backpropagation Neural Network(BPNN)classification model is applied to determine the appropriate class labels of aerial images.The performance of SSO-CapsNet model was validated against two openly-accessible datasets namely,UC Merced(UCM)Land Use dataset andWHU-RS dataset.The proposed SSO-CapsNet model outperformed the existing state-of-the-art methods and achieved maximum accuracy of 0.983,precision of 0.985,recall of 0.982,and F-score of 0.983.

Aerodynamic Analysis and Simulation of Flapping Wing Aerial Vehicles on Hovering

In order to design and verify control algorithms for flapping wing aerial vehicles(FWAVs),calculation models of the translational force,rotational force and virtual mass force were established with the basis on the modified quasi-steady aerodynamic theory and high lift mechanisms of insect flight.The simulation results show that the rotational force and virtual mass force can be ignored in the hovering FWAVs with simple harmonic motions in a cycle.The effects of the wing deformation on aerodynamic forces were investigated by regarding the maximum rotational angle of wingtip as a reference variable.The simulation results also show that the average lift coefficient increases and drag coefficient decreases with the increase of the maximum rotational angle of wingtip in the range of 0-90°.

A Secure Key Agreement Scheme for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles-Based Crowd Monitoring System

Unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)have recently attractedwidespread attention in civil and commercial applications.For example,UAVs(or drone)technology is increasingly used in crowd monitoring solutions due to its wider air footprint and the ability to capture data in real time.However,due to the open atmosphere,drones can easily be lost or captured by attackers when reporting information to the crowd management center.In addition,the attackers may initiate malicious detection to disrupt the crowd-sensing communication network.Therefore,security and privacy are one of the most significant challenges faced by drones or the Internet of Drones(IoD)that supports the Internet of Things(IoT).In the literature,we can find some authenticated key agreement(AKA)schemes to protect access control between entities involved in the IoD environment.However,the AKA scheme involves many vulnerabilities in terms of security and privacy.In this paper,we propose an enhancedAKAsolution for crowdmonitoring applications that require secure communication between drones and controlling entities.Our scheme supports key security features,including anti-forgery attacks,and confirms user privacy.The security characteristics of our scheme are analyzed byNS2 simulation and verified by a random oracle model.Our simulation results and proofs show that the proposed scheme sufficiently guarantees the security of crowd-aware communication.

Structural optimization and stability analysis of the ducted fan unmanned aerial vehicles

This article investigates the improvement of dynamics stability of the ducted fan unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs) by optimizing its mechanical-structure parameters. The instability phenomenon of the ducted fan unmanned aerial vehicles takes place frequently that easily leads to vibration and even out of control, due to complicated airflow. The dynamics equations mirror its dynamics characteristics, which is primarily influenced by the mechanical-structure parameters of the whole system. Based on this, the optimization of mechanical-structure parameters will improve the dynamics stability of the whole system. Therefore, this paper uses the concept of Lyapunov exponents to build the quantification relationship between system's mechanical-structure parameters and its motion stability to enhance its stability. The simulation experimental results indicate that compared with the direct Lyapunov method, the most important advantage of the proposed method is its constructivity, so it is an effective tool for analysis of the motion stability of other non-linear systems such as robots.