Computer Vision for Autonomous UAV Flight Safety: An Overview and a Vision-based Safe Landing Pipeline Example

Recent years have seen an unprecedented spread of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, or “drones”), which are highly useful for both civilian and military applications. Flight safety is a crucial issue in UAV navigation, having to ensure accurate compliance with recently legislated rules and regulations. The emerging use of autonomous drones and UAV swarms raises additional issues, making it necessary to transfuse safety- and regulations-awareness to relevant algorithms and architectures. Computer vision plays a pivotal role in such autonomous functionalities. Although the main aspects of autonomous UAV technologies (e.g., path planning, navigation control, landing control, mapping and localization, target detection/tracking) are already mature and well-covered, ensuring safe flying in the vicinity of crowds, avoidance of passing over persons, or guaranteed emergency landing capabilities in case of malfunctions, are generally treated as an afterthought when designing autonomous UAV platforms for unstructured environments. This fact is reflected in the fragmentary coverage of the above issues in current literature. This overview attempts to remedy this situation, from the point of view of computer vision. It examines the field from multiple aspects, including regulations across the world and relevant current technologies. Finally, since very few attempts have been made so far towards a complete UAV safety flight and landing pipeline, an example computer vision-based UAV flight safety pipeline is introduced, taking into account all issues present in current autonomous drones. The content is relevant to any kind of autonomous drone flight (e.g., for movie/TV production, news-gathering, search and rescue, surveillance, inspection, mapping, wildlife monitoring, crowd monitoring/management), making this a topic of broad interest.

Airlight (A UAVs based light guidance and search light system)

Airlight, an UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) based real time focus and searching light system is a proposed solution which ensures guiding people safely on their path during a dark environment is one less thing to worry about. It is designed to identify a person through algorithms of object detection and also through usage of IoT and sensorics to enable power efficient use of spotlight and hence autonomously guiding people on their path during night-time. Airlight proves to be useful in various sectors such as helping farmers to look after their fields during night-time, security purposes, guiding construction workers while lifting heavy objects, military applications etc.

Emerging Military Applications of Free Space Optical Communication Technology: A Detailed Review

Free Space Optical Communication (FSOC) technology, designed to operate through free space as medium is rapidly emerging as reliable, fast & secure alternative for broadband communication. It is being researched & investigated for applications and technical utilities in both civil & military domain systems owing to its immense benefits including high security, better data rates & fast installations, no requirement of licensed spectrum, best costs & simplicity of design as compared to contemporary Radio Frequency (RF) systems. FSOC networks once established are difficult to detect & intercept in view of small divergence of the laser beams. This paper reviews the FSOC technology and presents features based merits as well as unmatched advantages & associated major applications in various fields collating them into a single reference point for future research. Efforts have also been invested to present a review of FSOC’s limitations & innovative emerging mitigation techniques which can prove to be a one stop feeder & a launch pad for future research in FSOC domain. A literature survey has been undertaken of available FSOC related military applications to review & gather relevant inputs to throw light on emerging trends in military applications including recent experiments & researched areas pertaining to laser systems & weapons, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), under sea usages, terrestrial applications, aerial, naval ships/shore based applications & RF/hybrid systems. It has been endeavored to shed light on findings & developments in these classified military domains to generate inputs for future work in this domain. Finally, a future technical roadmap and a way ahead & suggestions have been coined up pointing towards required impetus & focus areas in FSOC research domain.

PCM Thermal Storage Technology and its Military Applications: A Review

Phase Change Materials (PCM) are the most promising and budding technology in the field of Thermal Energy Storage (TES) and thermal comfort in buildings. PCMs are being extensively used and researched across the world for the improvement of thermal performance of buildings by smoothening temperature peaks as well as act as a power-saving tool in buildings where heating or cooling is required. PCMs can absorb and release heat or cold energy when it undergoes a phase change from solid to liquid and vice versa. This process takes place at a constant temperature absorbing a huge amount of energy in form of latent heat of fusion or vaporization in comparison to sensible heat which is absorbed with an increase of temperature. India’s frontiers stretch across a few of the world’s extreme terrains having extreme climatic conditions varying from extremely hot climates on western borders to extremely cold climates on its northern extremities. The unique characteristic of PCM based latent heat storage system can be utilized in lightweight prefabricated PUF insulated shelters used by security forces, to increase its thermal resistance or store excess heat from intermittent renewable sources during daytime for use during the night, thereby helping in maintaining a comfortable temperature inside the shelters. The PCMs characteristic of absorbing and releasing heat at a constant temperature can be effectively utilized in various other applications where thermal management or temperature control is of importance. It can also help in enhancing the mission reliability of its vehicles, equipment, plant, and electronic instruments when deployed in areas having extreme temperatures. In the present work, a broad study has been conducted based on recent progress and research across the world on PCM technology and its probable applications in the defense sector. The aim is to highlight the potential of PCMs to be utilized for the enhancement of the performance of manpower and critical equipment deployed under extreme climatic conditions encountered by the Security forces. Keywords: Phase Change Material, Thermal Energy Storage, Latent Heat Storage, Military Applications, Security forces, Indian Armed forces.

Detection and Tracking of UAV Targets Using Deep Learning

In recent years, the use of Flying drones and modern Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with the latest techniques and capabilities for both civilian and military applications growing sustainably on a large scope, Drones could autonomously fly in several environments and locations and could perform various missions, providing a system for UAV detection and tracking represent crucial importance. This paper discusses Designing Detection and Tracking method as a part of Aero-vehicle Defense System (ADS) for UAVs using Deep learning algorithms. The small Radar cross-section (RCS) foot-print makes a problem for Traditional methods and Aero-vehicle Defense systems to distinguish between birds, stealth fighters, and UAVs incomparable of size and RCS characteristics, the detection is a challenge in low RCS targets because the chance of detection is incredibly less moreover, in the existence of interference and clutter which reduce the performance of detection process rapidly.

DETECTION OF THE DSSS SIGNAL WITH VARIABLE PN CODES USING THE ANN

- Direct sequence spread spectrum systems appeared and are used to protect the transmitted data DSSS Systems might be one of the solutions for reliable and secured communications. Also, it is one of the approaches used by signals for transmitting bandwidth larger compared to the satisfied frequency related to the original information. The communication systems of SS were vital to suppress interference, complicating the detection and processing of secure communications, the technology of spread spectrum (DSSS) has been initially created for military applications. In a traditional DSSS system, the PN code is the primary key to make the receiver recover the transmitted data. In this paper, by using the MATLAB R2020a is used to simulate the proposed system, it is considered that the transmitter sends data bits and wants to protect the sent data by making each bit send with a PN code consisting of 127 bits randomly without informing the receiver of that. here the artificial neural network (ANN) was used as a tool to find the PN code for each initial value of 7 flip-flops. so, the receiver could detect the transmitted data with BER =0.

Efficient Identity-Based Broadcast Encryption Scheme on Lattices for the Internet of Things

In an identity-based broadcast encryption (IBBE) scheme, the ciphertext is usually appended with a set of user identities to specify intended recipients. However, as IBBE is adopted in extensive industries, the demand of anonymity for specific scenarios such as military applications is urgent and ought no more to be ignored. On the contrary, how to optimize computation and communication is an unavoidable challenge in the IBBE scheme construction, especially in the large-scaled resource-limited wireless networks such as the Internet of Things (IoT), where the cost of computation and communication should be mitigated as much as possible since other functions including connectivity and privacy should be given the top priority. Thus, we present an IBBE scheme from the lattice, in which we employ the Chinese remainder theorem and lattice basis delegation in fixed dimensions to obtain several desirable characteristics, such as constant-size public parameter, private key, and ciphertext. In addition, our encryption and decryption algorithms are more efficient than broadcast encryption (BE) schemes based on number-theoretic problems. To be noticed, our scheme can simultaneously achieve confidentiality and outsider anonymity against the chosen-plaintext attack under the hardness of the learning with error (LWE) problem.

Ayurvedic Plant Identification using Image Processing and Artificial Intelligence

Wireless networks provide small sensing, machine and wireless networking nodes. Different designs and implementation techniques were built based on the device requirements for wireless network sensors (WSN). Sensor networks are used in various applications, such as environmental monitoring, home automation, military applications, etc. In this study introduce an architectural survey and deployment of nodes in the Wi-Fi Sensor network in this article. The environmental features that can be added to the sensor networks are given. The program relies on the node installed in the WSN and is deterministic or random. But the biggest issue in both cases is the coverage of the region involved. Researcher also describe WSN routing protocols. In this paper, a new technique to deployment problem is proposed based on the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm which is enhanced for the deployment of sensor networks to gain better performance by trying to increase the coverage area of the network and energy consumption. The good performance of the proposed EABC algorithm shows that it can be utilized in the deployment of WSN.