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Drones are receiving popularity with time due to their advanced mobility. Although they were initially deployed for military purposes, they now have a wide array of applications in various public and private sectors. Further deployment of drones can promote the global economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though drones offer a number of advantages, they have limited flying time and weight carrying capacity. Effective drone schedules may assist with overcoming such limitations. Drone scheduling is associated with optimization of drone flight paths and may include other features, such as determination of arrival time at each node, utilization of drones, battery capacity considerations, and battery recharging considerations. A number of studies on drone scheduling have been published over the past years. However, there is a lack of a systematic literature survey that provides a holistic overview of the drone scheduling problem, existing tendencies, main research limitations, and future research needs. Therefore, this study conducts an extensive survey of the scientific literature that assessed drone scheduling. The collected studies are grouped into different categories, including general drone scheduling, drone scheduling for delivery of goods, drone scheduling for monitoring, and drone scheduling with recharge considerations. A detailed review of the collected studies is presented for each of the categories. Representative mathematical models are provided for each category of studies, accompanied by a summary of findings, existing gaps in the state-of-the-art, and future research needs. The outcomes of this research are expected to assist the relevant stakeholders with an effective drone schedule design.
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The Black Desert Drone Survey: New Perspectives on an Ancient Landscape
This paper presents the results of a large scale, drone-based aerial survey in northeastern Jordan. Drones have rapidly become one of the most cost-effective and efficient tools for collecting high-resolution landscape data, fitting between larger-scale, lower-resolution satellite data collection and the significantly more limited traditional terrestrial survey approaches. Drones are particularly effective in areas where anthropogenic features are visible on the surface but are too small to identify with commonly and economically available satellite data. Using imagery from fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, along with photogrammetric processing, we surveyed an extensive archaeological landscape spanning 32 km2 at the site of Wadi al-Qattafi in the eastern badia region of Jordan, the largest archaeological drone survey, to date, in Jordan. The resulting data allowed us to map a wide range of anthropogenic features, including hunting traps, domestic structures, and tombs, as well as modern alterations to the landscape including road construction and looting pits. We documented thousands of previously unrecorded and largely unknown prehistoric structures, providing an improved understanding of major shifts in the prehistoric use of this landscape.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2122443
- PAR ID:
- 10349763
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Remote Sensing
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2072-4292
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 702
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14030702
