Although unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are mostly used in military applications nowadays, the UAVs can also perform such scientific, public safety, and commercial tasks as data and image acquisition of disaster areas, map building, communication relays, search and rescue. UAVs can be used by traffic agencies for monitoring and control of road traffic, by survey organizations for topographic, geological and archaeological survey or by electricity companies for power line inspections.
The aircraft is controlled from the ground (the Ground Control Station or GCS), so it needs reliable communication links to and from the aircraft, but also to the local Air Traffic Control (ATC) authorities if required (usually when flying higher than 150-200 m above the ground). The GCS provides a working space for a pilot, navigator, instrument operator and usually a mission commander.
Due to the recent decrease in cost and improved performance of virtually all of their relevant sub-systems, they have become a commercially available technology, affordable to the wider public. Their use in swarms and in collaboration with other autonomously operating cyber–physical systems is already being investigated by a plethora of research projects and studies.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
