Communication and Control in Collaborative UAVs: Recent Advances and Future Trends

The recent progress in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) technology has significantly advanced UAV-based applications for military, civil, and commercial domains. Nevertheless, the challenges of establishing high-speed communication links, flexible control strategies, and developing efficient collaborative decision-making algorithms for a swarm of UAVs limit their autonomy, robustness, and reliability. Thus, a growing focus has been witnessed on collaborative communication to allow a swarm of UAVs to coordinate and communicate autonomously for the cooperative completion of tasks in a short time with improved efficiency and reliability. This work presents a comprehensive review of collaborative communication in a multi-UAV system. We thoroughly discuss the characteristics of intelligent UAVs and their communication and control requirements for autonomous collaboration and coordination. Moreover, we review various UAV collaboration tasks, summarize the applications of UAV swarm networks for dense urban environments and present the use case scenarios to highlight the current developments of UAV-based applications in various domains. Finally, we identify several exciting future research direction that needs attention for advancing the research in collaborative UAVs.

Neural Networks for Infectious Diseases Detection: Prospects and Challenges

Artificial neural network (ANN) ability to learn, correct errors, and transform a large amount of raw data into useful medical decisions for treatment and care have increased its popularity for enhanced patient safety and quality of care. Therefore, this paper reviews the critical role of ANNs in providing valuable insights for patients' healthcare decisions and efficient disease diagnosis. We thoroughly review different types of ANNs presented in the existing literature that advanced ANNs adaptation for complex applications. Moreover, we also investigate ANN's advances for various disease diagnoses and treatments such as viral, skin, cancer, and COVID-19. Furthermore, we propose a novel deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model called ConXNet for improving the detection accuracy of COVID-19 disease. ConXNet is trained and tested using different datasets, and it achieves more than 97% detection accuracy and precision, which is significantly better than existing models. Finally, we highlight future research directions and challenges such as complexity of the algorithms, insufficient available data, privacy and security, and integration of biosensing with ANNs. These research directions require considerable attention for improving the scope of ANNs for medical diagnostic and treatment applications.