Unmanned Aircraft Systems in Remote Sensing and Scientific Research: Classification and Considerations of Use

By A. Watts, V. Ambrosia, E. Hinkley. Remote Sensing, 2012

885 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have evolved rapidly over the past decade driven primarily by military uses, and have begun finding application among civilian users for earth sensing reconnaissance and scientific data collection purposes. Among UAS, promising characteristics are long flight duration, improved mission safety, flight repeatability due to improving autopilots, and reduced operational costs when compared to manned aircraft. The potential advantages of an unmanned platform, however, depend on many factors, such as aircraft, sensor types, mission objectives, and the current UAS regulatory requirements for operations of the particular platform. The regulations concerning UAS operation are still in the early development stages and currently present significant barriers to entry for scientific users. In this article we describe a variety of platforms, as well as sensor capabilities, and identify advantages of each as relevant to the demands of users in the scientific research sector. We also briefly discuss the current state of regulations affecting UAS operations, with the purpose of informing the scientific community about this developing technology whose potential for revolutionizing natural science observations is similar to those transformations that GIS and GPS brought to the community two decades ago.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c70c2cc57354febaabc353ae1ba3fb978dc584b

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Citations in the corpus

Inventory of Small Forest Areas Using an Unmanned Aerial System (2015, background): “Due to these advantages, rapid growth of the UAS sector is predicted for the next decade [7,10,11].”
Structure from Motion (SfM) Photogrammetry with Drone Data: A Low Cost Method for Monitoring Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Forests in Developing Countries (2017, background): “This makes small UAVs the ideal platfor for SfM because they operate at distances of only a few tens of meters above the ground, providing data with sub‐decimetric spatial resolution—orders of magnitude finer than space‐borne sensors with the capability to resolve individual trees and pla”
A small unmanned aerial system for estimating abundance and size of Antarctic predators (2015, background): “…of fixed-wing aircraft, noise levels associated with gasoline engines compared with electric motors, and the challenges faced by small fixed-wing aircraft in maneuvering over and collecting high-resolution images of small targets in moderate winds (Watts et al. 2012; Hodgson et al. 2013).”
Assessing use of and reaction to unmanned aerial systems in gray and harbor seals during breeding and molt in the UK (2015, background): “One of the most attractive aspects of a functional unmanned aerial system (UAS) is the ability to obtain information that is otherwise simply not possible or prohibitively expensive using traditional methods (Koh and Wich 2012; Watts et al. 2012; Hodgson et al. 2013).”
Processing and Assessment of Spectrometric, Stereoscopic Imagery Collected Using a Lightweight UAV Spectral Camera for Precision Agriculture (2013, neutral): “[50].”
Will remote sensing shape the next generation of species distribution models? (2015, background): “An emerging alternative source of very high-resolution DEMs are UAVs (Anderson and Gaston 2013), which are rapidly becoming more reliable, lightweight and cost effective for LiDAR instrumentation (Watts et al. 2012).”
Remote sensing of forest pest damage: a review and lessons learned from a Canadian perspective* (2016, background): “…technology that may have potential for application to forest insect damage monitoring and assessment is that of UAV (i.e., drones; see the following reviews: Watts et al. 2012; Colomina and Molina 2014; Nex and Remondino 2014; Salamí, et al. 2014; Whitehead and Hugenholtz 2014; Pajares 2015).”
Survey on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks for Civil Applications: A Communications Viewpoint (2016, background): “Area coverage structure and surface monitoring [32] [89] [90], construction site monitoring (cDrones [72]), mapping of archaeological sites [91] [92], bridge inspection [93] vegetation monitoring [47] [94], aerial photography [95], event coverage and journalism [61] [96], mapping of disasters such a”
Survey on Coverage Path Planning with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (2019, background): “In these cases, the aerial platforms can be categorized considering low, medium, and high altitude, and also considering short and long endurance [14].”
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for Monitoring Soil Erosion in Morocco (2012, neutral): “[1] give a detailed disquisition on”
Low-Altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles-Based Internet of Things Services: Comprehensive Survey and Future Perspectives (2016, background): “Another good classification of drones is given in [31] that is according to diverse metrics such as the size, flight endurance, and capabilities.”
Lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles will revolutionize spatial ecology (2013, background): “Subsequent technological development has been driven by recognition of their potential to deliver highquality spatial data from portable and cost-effective platforms to a range of science end users (Watts et al. 2012).”
An Overview of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Air Quality Measurements: Present Applications and Future Prospectives (2016, methodology): “Dependi g on the sensors used, multiple data sets may be collected with a high spatial and temporal resolution [60,76,77].”
On the Use of Unmanned Aerial Systems for Environmental Monitoring (2018, positive): “Second, UAS satisfy safety requirements and accessibility issues for inspection of otherwise inaccessible sites or for hazard detection and monitoring [10].”
Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to capture micro-topography of Antarctic moss beds (2014, background): “…Vehicles (UAVs), also known as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), for remote sensing applications provide exciting new opportunities for ultra-high resolution environmental mapping and monitoring (Rango et al., 2006; Zarco-Tejada, 2008; Zhou et al., 2009; Hardin and Jensen, 2011; Watts et al., 2012).”