Review of Some Applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Technology in the Resource-Rich Country

Abstract

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in various spheres of human activity is a promising direction for countries with very different types of economies. This statement refers to resource-rich economies as well. The peculiarities of such countries are associated with the dependence on resource prices since their economies present low diversification. Therefore, the employment of new technologies is one of the ways of increasing the sustainability of such economy development. In this context, the use of UAVs is a prospect direction, since they are relatively cheap, reliable, and their use does not require a high-tech background. The most common use of UAVs is associated with various types of monitoring tasks. In addition, UAVs can be used for organizing communication, search, cargo delivery, field processing, etc. Using additional elements of artificial intelligence (AI) together with UAVs helps to solve the problems in automatic or semi-automatic mode. Such UAV is named intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle technology (IUAVT), and its employment allows increasing the UAV-based technology efficiency. However, in order to adapt IUAVT in the sectors of economy, it is necessary to overcome a range of limitations. The research is devoted to the analysis of opportunities and obstacles to the adaptation of IUAVT in the economy. The possible economic effect is estimated for Kazakhstan as one of the resource-rich countries. The review consists of three main parts. The first part describes the IUAVT application areas and the tasks it can solve. The following areas of application are considered: precision agriculture, the hazardous geophysical processes monitoring, environmental pollution monitoring, exploration of minerals, wild animals monitoring, technical and engineering structures monitoring, and traffic monitoring. The economic potential is estimated by the areas of application of IUAVT in Kazakhstan. The second part contains the review of the technical, legal, and software-algorithmic limitations of IUAVT and modern approaches aimed at overcoming these limitations. The third part—discussion—comprises the consideration of the impact of these limitations and unsolved tasks of the IUAVT employment in the areas of activity under consideration, and assessment of the overall economic effect.

Winter Wheat Nitrogen Estimation Based on Ground-Level and UAV-Mounted Sensors

“…The Multiplex 3 portable sensor has also been widely used for plant N diagnosis in recent years, and it can detect plant chlorophyll and flavonol compounds simultaneously through the chlorophyll fluorescence method [17]. As a new exploration of the low-altitude remote sensing method, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based sensing has been widely used in different fields recently due to its flexibility, affordability, and applicability for large-scale monitoring compared to handheld active sensing [18,19]. Digital color images acquired by UAV or airplane-mounted sensors have also proven to be a feasible way to estimate canopy variables such as leaf chlorophyll content [20], nitrogen status [21], wheat senescence [22], and vegetation cover [23] in a large area [24].…”

Extraction of a Weak Flow Field for a Multi-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Using High-Speed Background-Oriented Schlieren (BOS) Technology

“…At present, different experiments have their own appropriate experimental background pattern and layout setups [36]. However, these setups should satisfy the following basic requirements: (1) The background pattern should have a clear contrast, such as black dots on a white background or white dots on a black background. (2) The number of generated background points should be sufficient to ensure accuracy.…”

“…At present, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) industry has a wide range of application prospects in both military and civilian operations [ 1 ]. With the effectiveness advantages such as taking off and landing without a runway, autonomous operation, and a wide scope of work, multi-rotor UAVs, as the most commonly used type of UAV, are widely employed in military reconnaissance [ 2 , 3 , 4 ], military strikes [ 5 ], disaster rescue, tilt photography imaging, agricultural applications [ 6 , 7 ], logistics transportation, exploration, and other fields [ 8 , 9 ].…”

“…Moreover, in addition to the visual expression of fluid changes, qualitative and quantitative analyses have further gradually emerged to achieve the acquisition and analysis of flow phenomena. In general, flow visualization technologies are mainly divided into three categories [15]: (1) Adding tracer particles: Some particles that are easy to track and locate in the area of influence of the experimental fluid are added, and the movement state of the fluid is displayed by these tracer particles [16]. (2) Surface adhesion coating: Some coating materials (such as pressure-sensitive coating) are attached to the surface of the object to be tested in a wind tunnel experiment.…”

“…(3) Optical-based flow visualization method: Compared with the above two types of flow visualization methods, the optical-based flow visualization method uses the deflection characteristics of light in a flow field to display the flow of a fluid and the physical parameters of a flow field through optical changes [18][19][20]. The optical-based flow visualization method has many advantages: (1) Non-contact measurement does not require the addition of tracer particles or additional sensors in the flow field; so, the flow field changes are not affected;…”