On Drones

Design Perspectives on Delivery Drones

On Realistic Target Coverage by Autonomous Drones

Low-cost mini-drones with advanced sensing and maneuverability enable a new class of intelligent sensing systems. Œis trend motivated several research e‚orts to employ drones as standalone systems or to assist legacy deployments. However, several fundamental challenges remain unsolved including: 1) Adequate coverage of sizable targets; 2) Target orientation that render coverage e‚ective only fr...

Droning on About Drones—Acceptance of and Perceived Barriers to Drones in Civil Usage Contexts

The word “drone” is commonly associated with the military. However, the same term is also used for multicopters that can be and are used by civilians for a multitude of purposes. Nowadays, drones are tested for commercial delivery of goods or building inspections. A survey of 200 people, laypersons and active users, on their acceptance and perceived barriers for drone use was conducted. In the ...

Directing Cinematographic Drones

Quadrotor drones equipped with high quality cameras have rapidely raised as novel, cheap and stable devices for filmmakers. While professional drone pilots can create aesthetically pleasing videos in short time, the smooth – and cinematographic – control of a camera drone remains challenging for most users, despite recent tools that either automate part of the process or enable the manual desig...

Vehicle Routing with Drones

We introduce a package service model where trucks as well as drones can deliver packages. Drones can travel on trucks or fly; but while flying, drones can only carry one package at a time and have to return to a truck to charge after each delivery. We present a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem of finding a good schedule for all drones and trucks. The algorithm is based on two nested loc...