UAV Technology Taxonomy

High resolution UAV Taxonomy Description: UAV technology is a large and broad term, where different fields use the term with different connotations and meanings. Taxonomies can help create a shared knowledge representation and ways to communicate in interdisciplinary teams [5, 6]. This taxonomy presents different technologies as identified by their implementation in hardware or software. Important to understand is that each block, relation and end-point can be a research field on its own, and there is no clear beginning or end to UAV-technologies, as it lends from other technological developments. The main distinction that is made is between hardware technologies and software technologies. Under hardware technologies we understand platforms, components and payloads. Platforms are the different UAV designs, such as multirotors and fixed-wing aircraft; this branch ends with some examples of off-the-shelf systems. Payloads are important in many UAV applications, as the bird's-eye perspective that the UAV offers is unique and essential for its usability. Many different payloads and sensors exist, and important is to note the domain-specific sensors, such as gas-sensors, microphones, lights, sprayers, and parcel systems. Components are what is used on a UAV platform to be able to fly, such as batteries, motors and inertial measurement units (IMU) for balance. The most important part here is the flight-controller, which interfaces the motors, sensors and inputs to a central computing chip. This is also where the first intersection between hardware and software exists, firmware. Firmware in this case controls the direct balance, stability and control of the aircraft, by integrating various sensor and input values, and sending information to the motors to maintain flight and balance. In addition, it deals with communication protocols between ground stations or other networks. Certain flight controllers can only run certain firmware. Under this control section of UAVs are also path planning, auto-piloting and fleet management. Under software analysis, a decision was made to split between pre- and post processing software. Various pre-processing steps exist for UAV usages, and deal with creating large maps of the sensed area (orthomosaics) from digital and multispectral observations, or combining various laser scans from a LiDAR. Under post-processing, analysis methodologies are presented, which can be physical modelling of remotely sensed objects using PR