Drone as a Sensors’ Platform

The rapid development and growth of UAVs as a remote sensing platforms advances in the miniaturization of instrumentation and data systems that drives new application of drones in a variety of fields and disciplines from precision agriculture to ecology, atmospheric research, and disaster response. Drones without sensors would be useless devices. Sensors are required for a proper operation of UAVs. Apart from being “eyes” of drones additional sensors can be installed on UAV platforms to gather extra information. Drone can be used to deliver sensors to area where ad-hoc Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can be created. WSN is most often set up in ad-hoc mode by means of small-size devices grouped into network nodes distributed densely over a significant area. The paper makes a concise overview of UAVs as a sensors’ platform. In the context of a hybrid UAV-WSN network a Brooks-Iyengar sensor fusion algorithm is presented.