UM UAV-Drones Special Interest Group

The use of UAVs and Drones (UAV-drones) has been rapidly increasing across a range of commercial applications. UAV-drones provide the means to acquire spatially exhaustive, high-resolution data in less time, at lower costs, and in smaller areas compared to satellite systems and manned aircraft. Other advantages of UAV-drones are high flexibility, high security, less-affected by natural environment and better visual perspective. UAV here refers to Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle (airborne, marine and terrestrial).

Drones are capable of a wide variety of functions, for example in consumer entertainment (live broadcast of large-scale events - wedding, sports and music concerts, film-making, and advertisement shooting); improving life-saving response, rescue and recovery efforts; deliver basic medical aids and retrieve medical samples, into and out of remote or otherwise inaccessible regions; infrastructure inspection; logistics and distribution (food, postal deliveries); precision agriculture to boost production (e.g., spraying of agricultural chemicals, mapping of farmland information, crop, soil and irrigation monitoring); etc. 

The UM UAV-Drones Special Interest Group would like to explore how UAV-drones operations open up new possibilities for airborne, marine and terrestrial data acquisition, detection, exploration and monitoring activities. Research in UAV-Drones is very interesting because of the blending of multiple technologies into a single device. UAV-drones exhibit huge potentials in supporting Industry 4.0 initiatives in the campus and at the national level.