The miniaturization of electronics, computers and sensors has created new opportunities for remote sensing applications. Despite the current restrictions on regulation, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with small thermal, laser or spectral sensors has emerged as a promising alternative for assisting modeling, mapping and monitoring applications in rangelands, forests and agricultural environments. This review provides an overview of recent research that has reported UAV flight experiments on the remote sensing of vegetated areas. To provide a differential trend to other reviews, this paper is not limited to crops and precision agriculture applications, but also includes forest and rangeland applications. This work follows a top-down categorization strategy and attempts to fill the gap between application requirements and the characteristics of selected tools, payloads and platforms. Furthermore, correlations between common requirements and the most frequently used solutions are highlighted.

Opening the sky to new classes of airspace user is a political and economic imperative for the European Union. Drone industries have a significant potential for economical growth according to the latest estimations. To enable this growth safely and efficiently, the CORUS project has developed a concept of operations for drones flying in Europe in very low-level airspace, which they have to share that space with manned aviation, and quite soon with urban air mobility aircraft as well. U-space services and the development of smart, automated, interoperable, and sustainable traffic management solutions are presented as the key enabler for achieving this high level of integration. In this paper, we present the U-space concept of operations (ConOps), produced around three new types of airspace volume, called X, Y, and Z, and the relevant U-space services that will need to be supplied in each of these. The paper also describes the reference high-level U-space architecture using the European air traffic management architecture methodology. Finally, the paper proposes the basis for the aircraft separation standards applicable by each volume, to be used by the conflict detection and resolution services of U-space.

Forest fires are a challenging problem for many countries. They often cause economical lost and ecological damage, and they can sometimes even cost human lives. Finding hot spots immediately after a fire is an important part of fighting forest fires. The main objective is to obtain a temperature map of the burned area, to locate the most critical embers. This information can help firefighter managers make the correct decisions about ground crew movements. The pervasive application described in this article lets firefighters obtain images of hot spots directly from an unmanned aircraft and receive commands from their manager through a communication network. Every firefighter holds a personal electronic device (PED), which includes a touch screen, Wi-Fi connectivity, a GPS receiver, and temperature sensors. Because terrain conditions such as abrupt ravines, rocks, and dense vegetation can introduce obstacles to connectivity, a balloon with a Wi-Fi device is tethered to every firefighter's truck to improve communication. In addition, a fixed-wing unmanned aircraft augments the number of communication layers to three. This article studies the quality of this three-layered network in maintaining the application's bandwidth requirements.

This paper presents an embedded hardware/software architecture specially designed to be applied on mini/micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). A UAV is a low-cost non-piloted airplane designed to operate in D-cube (Dangerous-Dirty-Dull) situations [8]. Many types of UAVs exist today; however with the advent of UAV's civil applications, the class of mini/micro UAVs is emerging as a valid option in a commercial scenario. This type of UAV shares limitations with most computer embedded systems: limited space, limited power resources, increasing computation requirements, complexity of the applications, time to market requirements, etc. UAVs are automatically piloted by an embedded system named "Flight Control System." Many of those systems are commercially available today, however no commercial system exists nowadays that provides support to the actual mission that the UAV should perform. This introduces a hardware/software architecture specially designed to operate as a flexible payload and mission controller in a mini/micro UAV. Given that the missions UAVs can carry on justify their existence; we believe that specific payload and mission controllers for UAVs should be developed. Our architectonic proposal for them orbits around four key elements: a LAN-based distributed and scalable hardware architecture, a service/subscription based software architecture and an abstraction communication layer.

Forest fires are an important problem for many countries. The economical loss is the most visible impact in the short term. The ecological damage and the impact on the wild life diversity and climate change are the most important factors in the long term. Up to now, satellites like NASA's MODIS (moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer) system have been the primary source for strategic large area thermal imaging. Tactical monitoring has been until recently reduced to observation from the ground or from some dedicated aerial resource like command and control helicopters. However, little technological support has been available to those in charge of these monitoring tasks. An unmanned aerial systems (UAS) platform capable of overflying the area of a forest fire and with capacity of operating from non-prepared terrains would be an extremely valuable information gathering asset in several well-defined circumstances: surveillance during day and specially night, and early morning or late afternoon monitoring of post-fire hot-spots during the following days of the extinction. This work introduces the Sky-Eye system, a helicopter-based UAS platform that together with its hardware/software architecture is designed to facilitate the development of wildfire remote sensing applications. The Sky-Eye UAS will improve the overall awareness by providing tactical support to wildfire monitoring and control of ground squads. Sky-Eye employs existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology that can be immediately deployed on the field on-board medium-sized UAS helicopters at a reasonable cost. Sky-Eye is built on top of a user-parameterizable architecture called USAL (UAS Service Abstraction Layer). This architecture defines a collection of standard services and their interrelations as a basic starting point for further development. Functionalities like enhanced flight-plans, a mission control engine, data storage, communications management, etc. are offered.