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.

A method to interpret fracture aperture of rock slope using adaptive shape and unmanned aerial vehicle multi-angle nap-of-the-object photogrammetry

The aperture of natural rock fractures significantly affects the deformation and strength properties of rock masses,as well as the hydrodynamic properties of fractured rock masses.The conventional measurement methods are inadequate for collecting data on high-steep rock slopes in complex mountainous regions.This study establishes a high-resolution three-dimensional model of a rock slope using unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)multi-angle nap-of-the-object photogrammetry to obtain edge feature points of fractures.Fracture opening morphology is characterized using coordinate projection and transformation.Fracture central axis is determined using vertical measuring lines,allowing for the interpretation of aperture of adaptive fracture shape.The feasibility and reliability of the new method are verified at a construction site of a railway in southeast Tibet,China.The study shows that the fracture aperture has a significant interval effect and size effect.The optimal sampling length for fractures is approximately 0.5e1 m,and the optimal aperture interpretation results can be achieved when the measuring line spacing is 1%of the sampling length.Tensile fractures in the study area generally have larger apertures than shear fractures,and their tendency to increase with slope height is also greater than that of shear fractures.The aperture of tensile fractures is generally positively correlated with their trace length,while the correlation between the aperture of shear fractures and their trace length appears to be weak.Fractures of different orientations exhibit certain differences in their distribution of aperture,but generally follow the forms of normal,log-normal,and gamma distributions.This study provides essential data support for rock and slope stability evaluation,which is of significant practical importance.

Underdetermined direction of arrival estimation with nonuniform linear motion sampling based on a small unmanned aerial vehicle platform

Uniform linear array(ULA)radars are widely used in the collision-avoidance radar systems of small unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs).In practice,a ULA's multi-target direction of arrival(DOA)estimation performance suffers from significant performance degradation owing to the limited number of physical elements.To improve the underdetermined DOA estimation performance of a ULA radar mounted on a small UAV platform,we propose a nonuniform linear motion sampling underdetermined DOA estimation method.Using the motion of the UAV platform,the echo signal is sampled at different positions.Then,according to the concept of difference co-array,a virtual ULA with multiple array elements and a large aperture is synthesized to increase the degrees of freedom(DOFs).Through position analysis of the original and motion arrays,we propose a nonuniform linear motion sampling method based on ULA for determining the optimal DOFs.Under the condition of no increase in the aperture of the physical array,the proposed method obtains a high DOF with fewer sampling runs and greatly improves the underdetermined DOA estimation performance of ULA.The results of numerical simulations conducted herein verify the superior performance of the proposed method.

A new approach to study terrestrial yardang geomorphology based on high-resolution data acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs): A showcase of whaleback yardangs in Qaidam Basin, NW China

Yardangs are wind-eroded ridges usually observed in arid regions on Earth and other planets. Previous geomorphology studies of terrestrial yardang fields depended on satellite data and limited fieldwork. The geometry measurements of those yardangs based on satellite data are limited to the length, the width, and the spacing between the yardangs; elevations could not be studied due to the relatively low resolution of the satellite acquired elevation data, e.g. digital elevation models(DEMs). However, the elevation information(e.g. heights of the yardang surfaces) and related information(e.g. slope) of the yardangs are critical to understanding the characteristics and evolution of these aeolian features. Here we report a novel approach, using unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs) to generate centimeterresolution orthomosaics and DEMs for the study of whaleback yardangs in Qaidam Basin, NW China. The ultra-high-resolution data provide new insights into the geomorphology characteristics and evolution of the whaleback yardangs in Qaidam Basin. These centimeter-resolution datasets also have important potential in:(1) high accuracy estimation of erosion volume;(2) modeling in very fine scale of wind dynamics related to yardang formation;(3) detailed comparative planetary geomorphology study for Mars, Venus, and Titan.

Contour Based Path Planning with B-Spline Trajectory Generation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) over Hostile Terrain

This research focuses on trajectory generation algorithms that take into account the stealthiness of autonomous UAVs;generating stealthy paths through a region laden with enemy radars. The algorithm is employed to estimate the risk cost of the navigational space and generate an optimized path based on the user-specified threshold altitude value. Thus the generated path is represented with a set of low-radar risk waypoints being the coordinates of its control points. The radar-aware path planner is then approximated using cubic B-splines by considering the least radar risk to the destination. Simulated results are presented, illustrating the potential benefits of such algorithms.

Rotary unmanned aerial vehicles path planning in rough terrain based on multi-objective particle swarm optimization

This paper presents a path planning approach for rotary unmanned aerial vehicles(R-UAVs)in a known static rough terrain environment.This approach aims to find collision-free and feasible paths with minimum altitude,length and angle variable rate.First,a three-dimensional(3D)modeling method is proposed to reduce the computation burden of the dynamic models of R-UAVs.Considering the length,height and tuning angle of a path,the path planning of R-UAVs is described as a tri-objective optimization problem.Then,an improved multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm is developed.To render the algorithm more effective in dealing with this problem,a vibration function is introduced into the collided solutions to improve the algorithm efficiency.Meanwhile,the selection of the global best position is taken into account by the reference point method.Finally,the experimental environment is built with the help of the Google map and the 3D terrain generator World Machine.Experimental results under two different rough terrains from Guilin and Lanzhou of China demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed algorithm in finding Pareto optimal paths.

Review of Effective Vegetation Mapping Using the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) Method

We tried more precise mapping of vegetation using UAV?(unmanned aerial vehicle), as a new method of creating vegetation maps, and we?objected to be clearly the efficient mapping of vegetation using the UAV method by comparing vegetation maps created by analysing aerial photographs taken by a UAV and an aircraft (manned flight). The aerial photography using UAV was conducted in the Niida River estuary (the secondary river flowing into Minamisoma City in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan). The photography period was in August 2013. We analysed the aerial photographs using ArcGis 9 (Esri Japan Corporation, Tokyo, Japan). The aerial photographs of the main plant communities (Phragmites australis,?Typha domingensis, and?Miscanthus sacchariflorus) taken by the UAV could clearly discriminate each plant community at the 1/50 scale. Moreover, it could clearly discriminate the shape of a plant at the 1/10 scale. We compared the vegetation maps by analysing the aerial photos taken by a UAV (2013 shooting) and an aircraft (2011 shooting). As a result, the vegetation map created by the UAV method could clearly discriminate community distributions. We conclude that vegetation surveys using UAV are possible and are capable of a highly precise community division in places where field reconnaissance is difficult. The UAV method is effective and will contribute to the improvement of research methods in the future;this method may reduce research costs associated with a reduction in field survey days and man-power.

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.

Placement of unmanned aerial vehicles as communication relays in two-tiered multi-agent system:clustering based methods

The network performance and the unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)number are important objectives when UAVs are placed as communication relays to enhance the multi-agent information exchange.The problem is a non-deterministic polynomial hard(NP-hard)multi-objective optimization problem,instead of generating a Pareto solution,this work focuses on considering both objectives at the same level so as to achieve a balanced solution between them.Based on the property that agents connected to the same UAV are a cluster,two clustering-based algorithms,M-K-means(MKM)and modified fast search and find density of peaks(MFSFDP)methods,are first proposed.Since the former algorithm requires too much computational time and the latter one requires too many relays,an algorithm for the balanced network performance and relay number(BPN)is proposed by discretizing the area to avoid missing the optimal relay positions and defining a new local density function to reflect the network performance metric.Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are feasible and effective.Comparisons between these algorithms show that the BPN algorithm uses fewer relay UAVs than the MFSFDP and classic set-covering based algorithm,and its computational time is far less than the MKM algorithm.

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.

IRS Assisted UAV Communications against Proactive Eavesdropping in Mobile Edge Computing Networks

In this paper,we consider mobile edge computing(MEC)networks against proactive eavesdropping.To maximize the transmission rate,IRS assisted UAV communications are applied.We take the joint design of the trajectory of UAV,the transmitting beamforming of users,and the phase shift matrix of IRS.The original problem is strong non-convex and difficult to solve.We first propose two basic modes of the proactive eavesdropper,and obtain the closed-form solution for the boundary conditions of the two modes.Then we transform the original problem into an equivalent one and propose an alternating optimization(AO)based method to obtain a local optimal solution.The convergence of the algorithm is illustrated by numerical results.Further,we propose a zero forcing(ZF)based method as sub-optimal solution,and the simulation section shows that the proposed two schemes could obtain better performance compared with traditional schemes.

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.

Trajectory Tracking of Vertical Take-off and Landing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Disturbance Rejection Control

We investigate the trajectory tracking problem of vertical take-off and landing(VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV), and propose a practical disturbance rejection control strategy. Firstly, the nonlinear error model is established completely by the modified Rodrigues parameters, while considering dynamics of the servo actuators. Then, a hierarchical control scheme is applied to design the translational and rotational controllers based on the time-scale property of each subsystem,respectively. And the linear extended state observer and auxiliary observer are used to deal with the uncertainties and saturation.At last, global stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed based on the singular perturbation theory. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

A two-stage optimization method for unmanned aerial vehicle inspection of an oil and gas pipeline network

Oil and gas pipeline networks are a key link in the coordinated development of oil and gas both upstream and downstream.To improve the reliability and safety of the oil and gas pipeline network, inspections are implemented to minimize the risk of leakage, spill and theft, as well as documenting actual incidents. In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles have been recognized as a promising option for inspection due to their high efficiency. However, the integrated optimization of unmanned aerial vehicle inspection for oil and gas pipeline networks, including physical feasibility, the performance of mission, cooperation, real-time implementation and three-dimensional(3-D) space, is a strategic problem due to its large-scale,complexity as well as the need for efficiency. In this work, a novel mixed-integer nonlinear programming model is proposed that takes into account the constraints of the mission scenario and the safety performance of unmanned aerial vehicles. To minimize the total length of the inspection path, the model is solved by a two-stage solution method. Finally, a virtual pipeline network and a practical pipeline network are set as two examples to demonstrate the performance of the optimization schemes. Moreover, compared with the traditional genetic algorithm and simulated annealing algorithm, the self-adaptive genetic simulated annealing algorithm proposed in this paper provides strong stability.

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(Hi MAT) vehicle is given to verify the validity of the proposed method.

Event-triggered leader-following formation control for multi-agent systems under communication faults: application to a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles

The main contribution of this paper is the design of an event-triggered formation control for leader-following consensus in second-order multi-agent systems(MASs)under communication faults.All the agents must follow the trajectories of a virtual leader despite communication faults considered as smooth time-varying delays dependent on the distance between the agents.Linear matrix inequalities(LMIs)-based conditions are obtained to synthesize a controller gain that guarantees stability of the synchronization error.Based on the closed-loop system,an event-triggered mechanism is designed to reduce the control law update and information exchange in order to reduce energy consumption.The proposed approach is implemented in a real platform of a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)under communication faults.A comparison between a state-of-the-art technique and the proposed technique has been provided,demonstrating the performance improvement brought by the proposed approach.

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.

High Spatial Resolution Mapping of Dykes Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) Photogrammetry: New Insights On Emplacement Processes

Remote sensing has played a pivotal role in our understanding of the geometry of dykes and dyke swarms on Earth,Venus and Mars(West and Ernst,1991;Mege and Masson,1995;Ernst et al.,2005).Since the 1970’s

A Data-Driven Adaptive Method for Attitude Control of Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this paper, a real-time online data-driven adaptive method is developed to deal with uncertainties such as high nonlinearity, strong coupling, parameter perturbation and external disturbances in attitude control of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Firstly, a model-free adaptive control (MFAC) method requiring only input/output (I/O) data and no model information is adopted for control scheme design of angular velocity subsystem which contains all model information and up-mentioned uncertainties. Secondly, the internal model control (IMC) method featured with less tuning parameters and convenient tuning process is adopted for control scheme design of the certain Euler angle subsystem. Simulation results show that, the method developed is obviously superior to the cascade PID (CPID) method and the nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI) method.

Road Traffic Monitoring from Aerial Images Using Template Matching and Invariant Features

Road traffic monitoring is an imperative topic widely discussed among researchers.Systems used to monitor traffic frequently rely on cameras mounted on bridges or roadsides.However,aerial images provide the flexibility to use mobile platforms to detect the location and motion of the vehicle over a larger area.To this end,different models have shown the ability to recognize and track vehicles.However,these methods are not mature enough to produce accurate results in complex road scenes.Therefore,this paper presents an algorithm that combines state-of-the-art techniques for identifying and tracking vehicles in conjunction with image bursts.The extracted frames were converted to grayscale,followed by the application of a georeferencing algorithm to embed coordinate information into the images.The masking technique eliminated irrelevant data and reduced the computational cost of the overall monitoring system.Next,Sobel edge detection combined with Canny edge detection and Hough line transform has been applied for noise reduction.After preprocessing,the blob detection algorithm helped detect the vehicles.Vehicles of varying sizes have been detected by implementing a dynamic thresholding scheme.Detection was done on the first image of every burst.Then,to track vehicles,the model of each vehicle was made to find its matches in the succeeding images using the template matching algorithm.To further improve the tracking accuracy by incorporating motion information,Scale Invariant Feature Transform(SIFT)features have been used to find the best possible match among multiple matches.An accuracy rate of 87%for detection and 80%accuracy for tracking in the A1 Motorway Netherland dataset has been achieved.For the Vehicle Aerial Imaging from Drone(VAID)dataset,an accuracy rate of 86%for detection and 78%accuracy for tracking has been achieved.