Drone in IoT: Application, Research, Issues

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is becoming famous in recent years. Especially in none line of sight (NLOS) situations such as indoor environment, GPS is unable to find location.

This post was co-written with Sarfaraz Jarda.

Recent times have been a witness to the prowess of UAV technology being exploited for illegal activities such as criminal, terrorist purposes, and drug delivery platforms across the border. The main area of concern is drone localization. A common way to find a location is to use a GPS. However, GPS has several limitations such as its reliability, some of the localization techniques will be discussed in this article.

Let first focus on Drone why it’s important and why most of the giant companies and intelligence agencies are used this technology nowadays.

Introduction

A drone, or an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), is an aircraft that is remotely or non-remotely piloted. Drones are originally developed for soldiers and military purposes. However, nowadays drone can be used in industrial parks, surveying, firefighting, disaster relief, commercial use, delivering courier, scientific research, in the mining industry, etc. Furthermore, drone technology is attracting quite a significant research interest. In addition to the security and military applications, typically involving tracking or surveillance, the Earth Sciences present challenges entailing the coordination of air and ocean vehicles. Examples include studies of air-sea fluxes or coastal fronts. A quadrotor is a complex electromechanical dynamical system.

A robust controller is essential for any application of quadrotor. A conventional PID is widely used for quadrotor for its practicability and robustness over the years. These advancements have not only seen drones becoming popular amongst even the most casual of hobbyists but also in commercial endeavors. Large companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon have already invested heavily in research related to drones. More recently news agencies have begun to look at using drones to cover certain stories. The US has two separate ‘squadron’ of armed drones one run by US Air Force and one run by CIA. Using drones, the USAF Air force has increased the number of combats and air patrols.

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Drones gained a negative image with their recent military use, but the stigma of the word “drone” has largely worn off over the past few years with the proliferation of hobby and commercial models. The drone also can be used in military purpose, video-making, film making, inspection, agriculture, newsgathering, spraying of pesticides, for security purposes, oil spill monitoring, shipping emission monitoring; further uses include target monitoring and designation, as well as the elimination of designated targets. These small aerial acrobats can pack a lot of accessories into their metal or plastic frames. Most drones are ready-to-use, however, some people like building a drone themselves using kits, and to get more familiar with that topic, we suggest reading our article about the best drone kits and why are they the best. Figure 1 shows the total investment made by the government

Figure 1 total investment made by the USA government in billions by Divya Joshi [Artical]

Issues Related Drones

They’re set to devastate the world and begin the end of the world by ruling over humans, the however one-hour courier would be very sweet, Don’t you think? It’s advantageous to consider the genuine and unsolved issues with drones in the present military to paint a precise picture of humanity. Drones are very dangerous if we don’t use them wisely. Because of drones’ rapid rise to popularity, many drone companies have been surprisingly keeping their products hacker-proof so their products don’t do any damage to society.

Some of the hackers and researches hacked drones to recognize safety issues like one dutch researcher successfully hijacked drones with the use of laptops and USB port. A drone operator can usually control a commercial drone’s movements by sending signals from an app or computer-based controller to the drone’s flight controller, which acts as the drone’s “brain”. Some of the drones relate issues are listed below,

1. Air Safety: According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), more than 650 pilots have reported seeing unmanned aircraft as of Aug. 9 this year, compared to a total of 238 such sightings for all of 2014
2. Regulation: Staring from the last year, 36 states of the USA introduced legislation to protect humanity from drone-related privacy issues. So far just 17 states have passed laws restricting drone usage.
3. Flying Weapons: A video published last month of a handgun being fired from a flying drone quickly went viral, this led to some serious issues related to drones that can be turned into potential weapons. The newspaper also reported that Connecticut’s state senate is expected to make banning weapons on drones a priority issue when its new legislative session begins next February.
4. Privacy Policy: Government and military have lethal weapons, they can watch you from over 60000 feet, they can crack your cells in a matter of time, they have high tech cameras that can search entire cities in some time, they can easily determine your location, intercept your calls and much more, Drone manufacturers even admit they are made to carry “less lethal” weapons such as tasers or rubber bullets, the government needs to think about the privacy of peoples.
5. Collision Detection: Drones are poised to become a technology for agriculture monitoring, packet delivery, gathering news, monitoring urban environments, as the use of drones is increasing there may be a chance of collision in multiple drones. On this front, the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL) is part of a broad partnership led by NASA Ames to create an unmanned aerial system traffic management system, or UTM, to manage the expected surge in unmanned flights.
6. Commercial Use: Nowadays drones are used to surveillance around the mall, monitoring of traffic, monitoring of industrial parks, gardens, monitoring of the private property. As we can say it will lead to the privacy of the peoples and that’s a very dangerous issue. One of the project related drone is amazon prime which will courier your package in less than 30 minutes, in this scenario large number of drones will fly into limited air space, this will lead to the collision of drones and it will create the problems to the government because identification of all the drones will be much difficult. This will lead to serious security issues for the nations.

Research

After reading so many research paper Let’s talk about the limitation and approach. please read the research paper for more information.

1. Privacy in Mini-drone Based Video Surveillance [Margherita Bonetto, Pavel Korshunov, Giovanni Ramponi- EPEL]

Approach: Privacy issues in the multimedia application, the main approach is crowdsourcing for cognitive tasks, people are asked to answer the some of the question based on image, the crowdsourcing assessment aims to check whether the behavior of the individual can be detected or not.

Limitation: Major shortcoming of the crowdsourcing -based subjective evaluation is the inability to supervise participant’s behavior and to restrict their test conditions is not up to mark.

2. Analysis of Localization for Dronefleet [Jin-Hyeok Kang, Kyung-Joon Park, Hwangnam Kim 28–30 October 2015-IEEE]

Approach: 2 types of localization, centralized: information gathered to a central node, decentralized: Information transmitted to nearby nodes. GPS, TOA based techniques, RSSI: Measures the signal strength at the receiver. AOA is a method that finds location by the angle estimate between the direction of an incident wave and a certain reference direction

Limitation: Limitation of GPS: expensive, do not work in any line of sight, energy consumption is greater. AOA: This concept requires additional hardware not good in NLOS. TDOA: requires additional hardware

3. Drone Small Cells in the Clouds: Design, Deployment, and Performance Analysis [Mohammad Mozaffari, Walid Saad, Mehdi Bennis, Merouane Debbah by Cornell uni. Library. 5 Sept 2015]

Approach: The main contribution of this paper is to develop fundamental results on the coverage and optimal deployment of wireless DSCs. First, we analyze the optimal height for a DSC for which the required transmit power for covering a target area is minimized. study of The results has shown the existence of an optimal DSC’s separation distance.

Limitation: The ground receiver receives three groups of signals including LOS, strong reflected signals (NLOS), and multiple reflected components that cause multipath fading.

4. Drone Path Planning for Secure Positioning and Secure Position Verification [ Pericle Perazzo, Francesco Betti Sorbelli, Mauro Conti, Gianluca Dini, and Cristina M. Pinotti]

Approach: Many systems rely on the position of the components however it is expensive to deploy anchors at each point to analyze components, novel approach flight of drone to all waypoints. Communication range requirement: Verifiable triangle requirement: Localizer Bee: No prior knowledge of the positions, efficiency is further improved. Verifier Bee: Position is known, path planning, iteratively improved.

Limitation: The drone sometimes misses to measure a node or fail to include it in the verifiable triangle due to control errors. because in each iteration it compares and improves the efficiency of the path.

Application of Drones

1. Surveying of objects and ground on the basis of digital heights and 3d models from the sky.
2. Industrial inspection of solar parks, wind parks and inspection of agriculture, monitoring of private firms, monitoring of government body, an inspection of parking areas.
3. landscape photography, up to 360° spherical panoramas, Point-of-Interest (POI) imaging and Circle-of-Interest (COI) imaging, real estate photography.
4. Monitoring of plant and wildlife preservation and conservation, inspection, and monitoring of disaster relief areas.
5. Drone-based inspection and monitoring and repairing of damaged pipes, oil areas, in mining industries.
6. Drones are used to search and rescue the human from fire by doing fire-fighting work by giving the location of a person and drone can determine co2 and o2 into the atmosphere by using special equipment.
7. Unmanned cargo system — Drones also serve in delivering of lightweight packages and bundles of all sorts. This way, you can have a safe, environmentally friendly and fast transport of goods by air, and you can find out more about this topic by reading.
8. Drones can be used in search and rescue operations in floods.
9. Drones also can be used in the shipping and delivery of the packages.
10. 3D mapping with drones: Industry that deals with infrastructure projects, airport planning tasks, maintenance, and construction activities. Drones are capable enough to perform surveys with increased efficiency.
11. It can be used in agriculture where we can inspect crop type, plant count, canopy cover, soil type, growth strength, plant height, detasseling, yield monitoring.
12. It can be used in irrigation land mapping, watershed mapping.
13. Best use of drones in vegetation management, forest health.
14. It can be used to protect persons from potential threats.
15. Drones are best used for coastal surveillance, perimeter monitoring, anti-piracy operations.
16. It can be used in geographic management, feeding weather forecast.
17. Drones are being developed to provide entertainment for players so that they can be used in fight clubs. Known as a cage match, two contenders and their drones are put up against each other.

Conclusion

As we know that drone is gaining so much popularity nowadays. Time is near where all the applications will use drones instead of humans for their work. Drones are originally developed for soldiers and for military purposes. However, nowadays drone can be used in industrial parks, surveying, firefighting, disaster relief, commercial use, delivering courier, scientific research, in the mining industry, etc. Furthermore, drone technology is attracting quite a significant research interest. In addition to the security and military applications, typically involving tracking or surveillance, the Earth Sciences present challenges entailing the coordination of air and ocean vehicles.

In my next article, I briefly describe the Drone-based Garbage monitoring system for swachchh Bharat and other best applications.

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