Safety Enhancement of UAVs from the Signal Processing’s Perspectives: A Bird’s Eye View

Abstract

Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) or drones have gained popularity in recent years. However, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is still hesitant to open up the national air space (NAS) to UAVs due to safety concerns because UAVs have several orders of magnitude of more accidents than manned aircraft. To limit the scope in this paper, we focus on large, heavy, and expensive UAVs that can be used for cargo transfer and search and rescue operations, not small radio-controlled toy drones. We first present a general architecture for enhancing the safety of UAVs. We then illustrate how signal processing technologies can help enhance the safety of UAVs. In particular, we provide a bird’s eye view of the application of signal processing algorithms on condition-based maintenance, structural health monitoring, fault diagnostics, and fault mitigation, which all play critical roles in UAV safety. Some practical applications are used to illustrate the importance of the various algorithms.