Modern problems of UAVs?

Ali Doruk S. · Mar 7, 2025

Hello everyone, this is my first post here. I am a high school student currently in 9th grade, I am going to make a project on UAVs, therefore I am in search of modern UAVs problems. I plan to build my project on top of a problem so it is actually useful and makes a significant contribution to the growing genre. ANY help of any kind is appreciated, I would like from you dear engineers your experiences and personal views on UAVs.

IRstuff · Mar 7, 2025

Not sure where you live, but a recently new application for UAVs cropped up when my homeowner's insurance company used a drone to nitpick my roof condition as a means of justifying cancelling my policy.

I think that you want to look at any situation where a physical location needs to be accessed or inspected, often by a human.

GregLocock · Mar 7, 2025

Clearing fallen leaves out of gutters

rb1957 · Mar 10, 2025

I think you want UAV operators/hobbyists/users to reply.

I'd've thought a major problem is what happens when they lose the control signal ? Maybe they've thought of this, and the UAV has a "safe" mode, where it descends slowly and lands where it is ? I'd've thought they could have a "get home" reset ... remember when they took off from, and some clever AI to get them back there ?

3DDave · Mar 11, 2025

I don't know if this is a request for problems that UAVs can solve or problems that UAVs face.

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There have been some who have used UAVs to capture videos of volcanic eruptions where lava is blasted hundreds of feet into the air, only to lose control of the UAV because there are strong disruptions to the Earth's magnetic field that the drone uses to control orientation and apparently the control ends when the drone tries to follow the distortion in the magnetic field.

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Many UAVs already have "go home" software. Some of the funniest and horrifying to consider outcomes result from that. One guy was doing a circle around a volcanic core. It was going well until the control signal was eclipsed by the spire of rock, whereupon it took a straight line solution back to the launch point. The operator ended up with a climb of several hundred vertical feet on the scree slope to get to the damaged drone, a walk that also included a roughly half-mile walk around to get to the other side.

For a while DJI drones would wake up, skip some portion of the "home" initialization, and apparently set course for where "home" was, which is somewhere in China where it was last calibrated, either disappearing and never to be found or slamming into nearby obstacles. DJI soon fixed that, but it's an additional caution about getting what one asks for without considering everything that needs to be part of the request.
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One area where drones seem to me to have a unique value is in augmenting the inspection of bridges and other civil structures. The I-40 bridge between Tennessee and Arkansas at Nashville, for example. That crack had been recorded by a drone and no one had noticed it - this suggests that an addition of auto-compare image analysis needs to be added to the work flow. With a drone and RTK positioning, the entire flight path should be able to be duplicated within a centimeter so that repeated surveys would have nearly exact replication of the photography.

There is no reason the facade and roof of a building cannot get an annual portrait and differences highlighted.

IRstuff · Mar 11, 2025

There is no reason the facade and roof of a building cannot get an annual portrait and differences highlighted.

I have a metal roof, so whatever greenery might have been on the roof machts nichts; they did this specifically looking to cancel policies

3DDave · Mar 11, 2025

S building owner and maintainer might have different goals than the insurance company has. Just saw a story about an animal shelter that had a metal roof get torn off because of water leakage causing rot. There were likely to be rust stains from failed nails. Downtown a building lost a chunk of rock from 8-10 stories up that was part of a lintel for a window. The chunk was about 10 inch tall, 6 inch thick and nearly 3 feet long. Fortunately downtown was dead or someone certainly would be. It looked like a progressive failure from a small crack being jacked open by freezing water.

--- Just added to my YouTube feed (the internet is listening)

Gregorymeyers · Tuesday at 7:55 AM

3DDave said:
I don't know if this is a request for problems that UAVs can solve or problems that UAVs face.

---
There have been some who have used UAVs to capture videos of volcanic eruptions where lava is blasted hundreds of feet into the air, only to lose control of the UAV because there are strong disruptions to the Earth's magnetic field that the drone uses to control orientation and apparently the control ends when the drone tries to follow the distortion in the magnetic field.

---
Many UAVs already have "go home" software. Some of the funniest and horrifying to consider outcomes result from that. One guy was doing a circle around a volcanic core. It was going well until the control signal was eclipsed by the spire of rock, whereupon it took a straight line solution back to the launch point. The operator ended up with a climb of several hundred vertical feet on the scree slope to get to the damaged drone, a walk that also included a roughly half-mile walk around to get to the other side.

For a while DJI drones would wake up, skip some portion of the "home" initialization, and apparently set course for where "home" was, which is somewhere in China where it was last calibrated, either disappearing and never to be found or slamming into nearby obstacles. DJI soon fixed that, but it's an additional caution about getting what one asks for without considering everything that needs to be part of the request.
---
One area where drones seem to me to have a unique value is in augmenting the inspection of bridges and other civil structures. The I-40 bridge between Tennessee and Arkansas at Nashville, for example. That crack had been recorded by a drone and no one had noticed it - this suggests that an addition of auto-compare image analysis needs to be added to the work flow. With a drone and RTK positioning, the entire flight path should be able to be duplicated within a centimeter so that repeated surveys would have nearly exact replication of the photography.
---
It's great to see your interest in UAVs at such a young age. One of the big current challenges is battery life: most drones cannot fly for long periods of time, which limits their use in real-world missions. In addition, avoiding obstacles in complex environments is still difficult. When I wrote my school project, I used https://personalstatementhelper.com/ to better organize my ideas. You might find it useful as well. Another issue with UAVs is privacy: people worry about being spied on by drones. Keep exploring these angles and your project can really stand out.

There is no reason the facade and roof of a building cannot get an annual portrait and differences highlighted.

UAVs face navigation challenges in extreme environments, but their potential in infrastructure inspection is huge. Automated comparisons could revolutionize maintenance efficiency and safety!

IRstuff · Tuesday at 5:46 PM

It's just a matter of time; Ingenuity used a combination of nav systems, including visual image correlation; some acquaintances worked on similar approach about 10 years ago, significantly improving overall nav as well as nav with GPS/INS, since it could augment the estimates of the GPS/INS and improve their instantaneous accuracy. The latter is particularly important if there is a lot of multipath.

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Modern problems of UAVs?

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