UAV Sensors for Environmental Monitoring

The past decade has borne witness to a remarkable growth in the use of UAVs as remote sensing platforms. A wide range and selection of commercially available UAV platforms have entered the market. They can be acquired off-the-shelf at increasingly lower cost. This availability and affordability has been complemented by rapid advances in the miniaturization of cameras, sensors, instrumentation and data stores and transmission systems. UAV platforms have become smarter, more adroit, and more dexterous. The sensors they fly are lighter, cheaper, more compact, sophisticated and sensitive. Adoption of UAV technology has brought about a revolution in environmental monitoring. This transformative UAV innovation has been enthusiastically embraced by remote sensing applications and scientific disciplines. This book highlights advances in sensor technologies, navigation systems and sensors payloads including the following: autonomous aerial refueling; calibration method using low cost MEM IMUs; low cost airborne sensing systems; vision-based detection; UAVs task and motion planning in the presence of obstacles; ground-based radio navigation systems; smart flying sensors; UAV control using 3D landmark bearing-only observations; cooperative surveillance and pursuit; new multispectral camera system with different bandpass filters; synthetic aperture radar to aid UAV navigation; formation flight of multiple UAVs; shared autonomy; dual-stack single-radio communication architectures; GNSS-based passive radar; UAV navigation in cluttered and GPS-denied environments and UAV-based photogrammetry. The book also highlights a diverse range of new applicators including the estimation of carbon exports from heterogeneous soil landscapes; instruments to classify the water content feature of lands; wildlife monitoring and conservation; wildlife poachers detection; architectural surveys of vertical structures; environmental source localization and tracking; dust particles after blasting at open-pit mine sites; data collection from WSNs; inspection of pole-like structures; multi-UAV routing; emergency response; river hydromorphological features detection; dynamic UAV routing in traffic incident monitoring, and surveys on methods and inexpensive platforms for infrastructure inspection