Remote Management Architecture of UAV Fleets for Maintenance, Surveillance, and Security Tasks in Solar Power Plants

Web and MATLAB-Based Platform for UAV Flight Management and Multispectral Image Processing

The deployment of any UAV application in precision agriculture involves the development of several tasks, such as path planning and route optimization, images acquisition, handling emergencies, and mission validation, to cite a few. UAVs applications are also subject to common constraints, such as weather conditions, zonal restrictions, and so forth. The development of such applications requires the advanced software integration of different utilities, and this situation may frighten and dissuade undertaking projects in the field of precision agriculture. This paper proposes the development of a Web and MATLAB-based application that integrates several services in the same environment. The first group of services deals with UAV mission creation and management. It provides several pieces of flight conditions information, such as weather conditions, the KP index, air navigation maps, or aeronautical information services including notices to Airmen (NOTAM). The second group deals with route planning and converts selected field areas on the map to an UAV optimized route, handling sub-routes for long journeys. The third group deals with multispectral image processing and vegetation indexes calculation and visualizations. From a software development point of view, the app integrates several monolithic and independent programs around the MATLAB Runtime package with an automated and transparent data flow. Its main feature consists in designing a plethora of executable MATLAB programs, especially for the route planning and optimization of UAVs, images processing and vegetation indexes calculations, and running them remotely.

Dataset: Traffic Images Captured from UAVs for Use in Training Machine Vision Algorithms for Traffic Management

A dataset of Spanish road traffic images taken from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is presented with the purpose of being used to train artificial vision algorithms, among which those based on convolutional neural networks stand out. This article explains the process of creating the complete dataset, which involves the acquisition of the data and images, the labeling of the vehicles, anonymization, data validation by training a simple neural network model, and the description of the structure and contents of the dataset (which amounts to 15,070 images). The images were captured by drones (but would be similar to those that could be obtained by fixed cameras) in the field of intelligent vehicle management. The presented dataset is available and accessible to improve the performance of road traffic vision and management systems since there is a lack of resources in this specific domain.

DRONET: Multi-Tasking Framework for Real-Time Industrial Facility Aerial Surveillance and Safety

The security of key and critical infrastructures is crucial for uninterrupted industrial process flow needed in strategic management as these facilities are major targets of invaders. The emergence of non-military use of drones especially for logistics comes with the challenge of redefining the anti-drone approach in determining a drone’s harmful status in the airspace based on certain metrics before countering it. In this work, a vision-based multi-tasking anti-drone framework is proposed to detect drones, identifies the airborne objects, determines its harmful status through perceived threat analysis, and checks its proximity in real-time prior to taking an action. The model is validated using manually generated 5460 drone samples from six (6) drone models under sunny, cloudy, and evening scenarios and 1709 airborne objects samples of seven (7) classes under different environments, scenarios (blur, scales, low illumination), and heights. The proposed model was compared with seven (7) other object detection models in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, F1-score, latency, throughput, reliability, and efficiency. The simulation result reveals that, overall, the proposed model achieved superior multi-drone detection accuracy of 99.6%, attached object identification of sensitivity of 99.80%, and F1-score of 99.69%, with minimal error, low latency, and less computational complexity needed for effective industrial facility aerial surveillance. A benchmark dataset is also provided for subsequent performance evaluation of other object detection models.

Criticality Analysis and Maintenance of Solar Tower Power Plants by Integrating the Artificial Intelligence Approach

Maintenance of solar tower power plants (STPP) is very important to ensure production continuity. However, random and non-optimal maintenance can increase the intervention cost. In this paper, a new procedure, based on the criticality analysis, was proposed to improve the maintenance of the STPP. This procedure is the combination of three methods, which are failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA), Bayesian network and artificial intelligence. The FMECA is used to estimate the criticality index of the different elements of STPP. Moreover, corrections and improvements were introduced on the criticality index values based on the expert advice method. The modeling and the simulation of the FMECA estimations incorporating the expert advice method corrections were performed using the Bayesian network. The artificial neural network is used to predicate the criticality index of the STPP exploiting the database obtained from the Bayesian network simulations. The results showed a good agreement comparing predicted and actual criticality index values. In order to reduce the criticality index value of the critical elements of STPP, some maintenance recommendations were suggested.