Unmanned aerial vehicles’ (UAVs) safety has gained great research interest due to the increase in the number of UAVs in circulation and their applications, which has inevitably also led to an increase in the number of accidents in which these vehicles are involved. The paper presents a classification of UAV safety solutions that can be found in the scientific literature, putting in evidence the fundamental and critical role of sensors and measurements in the field. Proposals from research on each proposed class concerning flight test procedures, in-flight solutions including soft propeller use, fault and damage detection, collision avoidance and safe landing, as well as ground solution including testing and injury and damage quantification measurements are discussed.

Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm represents a technological challenge regarding the measurement applications which uses Internet for measurement data transmission and their management. This paper presents a comprehensive survey, where the IoT is (or, becoming) a desideratum for measurement applications. Attention is paid to intelligent transportation systems, smart and connected health, smart energy, environment, building, and factory.

In this paper, an overview of the research challenges in measurements for the design of Internet of Things (IoT) systems is proposed. To this end, a general architecture of an IoT system is presented, which is specialized according to two key requirements: the power supply capabilities of the infrastructure and the time delay constraints of the application. Guidelines for the design of an IoT system are summarized, and the measurement needs are highlighted. A review of the research contributions is given concerning three main measurement topics: (i) energy-aware data acquisition systems, (ii) localization of mobile IoT nodes, and (iii) precise synchronization protocols.

Finding new data acquisition methods for practical instrumentation development which can be used in case of monitoring purposes of aerospace RF spectrum are a key research area nowadays. With the increasing evolution of the signal bandwidths, the requirements for new acquisition capabilities are a necessity for modern aerospace RF measurement instrumentation systems. In particular, an overview of the current trends for wideband RF instrumentation has focused on the signal acquisition stages of the instruments. The most frequent RF signal acquisition architectures and also some research trends in designing of new systems, such as AIC based wideband RF spectrum acquisition, have been presented. In the case of AIC, it could be assumed that this unique combination of hardware and software offers a powerful method for the acquisition of wideband RF signals. Although no off-the-shelf device is available already, a lot of research is currently being carried out and some prototypes have been proposed. Issues such as: utilization of CS mathematic methods and acquisition hardware for real-time RF spectrum monitoring; reducing substantially the size, the analog RF front-end complexity and the power consumption by applying the CS framework; and providing a good RF signal spectrum estimation by using CS techniques, still remain open to the research community in the field.