Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has rapidly evolved, leading to its adoption in civilian and commercial sectors. UAVs offer numerous benefits, including cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and accessibility, making them invaluable assets in various industries such as precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, disaster response, and infrastructure inspection. However, the increased accessibility and availability of UAVs have also raised concerns about their potential use in illegal activities and terrorist attacks. This highlights the importance of identifying and classifying drones for safety and security purposes.

This article presents a 2.2-km high-speed transceiver system for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) video streaming applications at 39-GHz. This proposed system includes transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) modules, which are developed from TX/RX chips and flip-chip mounted on an IC package substrate, a pair of high-gain active antennas, and software-defined radio (SDR) modules for data-to-image conversion. The real-time video system’s characteristics have been demonstrated outdoors, marking the first video demonstration of a kilometer-scale long-range transmission at 39 GHz in UAV applications.

An emerging field of research is to use radar systems mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for detecting and monitoring a variety of environmental phenomena, such as the melting of glaciers, the drying out of crops and soils, and an increase in the risk of avalanches. This article presents the capabilities of UAV-based radar systems and the associated challenges in terms of system design and imaging techniques for detecting and monitoring the effects of climate change. 

This paper presents a UAV-driven sensor system with a rotating radar designed to locate people in collapsed buildings. A framework including motion estimation, motion compensation, tracking and clustering is proposed. The developed algorithms enable the detection of people despite the motion of the UAV. Furthermore, we propose a Bayesian target selection approach to discriminate between human targets and other objects. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated using measurements and a vital sign reference system.

Airplane produced contrail cirrus has a greenhouse effect in the atmosphere. This effect is as much as or more than any other airplane emission such as CO2. With air traffic anticipated to increase into the future it is important to understand contrail cirrus formation. This paper presents a new receiver instrument using the 424 GHz (O2) and 448 GHz (H2O) emission lines for thermal and humidity profiling that provides data to model airplane contrail formation.