Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges

By Hazim Shakhatreh, Ahmad H. Sawalmeh, Ala Al-Fuqaha, Zuochao Dou, Eyad K. Almaita, Issa M. Khalil, Noor Shamsiah Othman, Abdallah Khreishah, Mohsen Guizani. IEEE Access, 2018

1,931 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly across many civil application domains, including real-time monitoring, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. Smart UAVs are the next big revolution in the UAV technology promising to provide new opportunities in different applications, especially in civil infrastructure in terms of reduced risks and lower cost. Civil infrastructure is expected to dominate more than $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. In this paper, we present UAV civil applications and their challenges. We also discuss the current research trends and provide future insights for potential UAV uses. Furthermore, we present the key challenges for UAV civil applications, including charging challenges, collision avoidance and swarming challenges, and networking and security-related challenges. Based on our review of the recent literature, we discuss open research challenges and draw high-level insights on how these challenges might be approached.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d8ed0250d9278dab6c7086b02733285ec9c06272

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Citations in the corpus

A Comprehensive Review of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Attacks and Neutralization Techniques (2020, neutral): “UAVs find applications in various industries like logistics, structural monitoring, automation, and agriculture [40].”
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs): practical aspects, applications, open challenges, security issues, and future trends (2023, background): “[101], existing simulation test beds are not complete mature.”
Collaborative Multi-Robot Search and Rescue: Planning, Coordination, Perception, and Active Vision (2020, background): “A classiﬁcation of technological trends and sensing modalities in UAVs for civil applications is available in [9].”
What Will the Future of UAV Cellular Communications Be? A Flight From 5G to 6G (2021, neutral): “Reference → [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] Content ↓”
UAV assistance paradigm: State-of-the-art in applications and challenges (2020, background): “However, each kind of task has its own challenges and difﬁculties [10].”
Survey on 6G Frontiers: Trends, Applications, Requirements, Technologies and Future Research (2021, background): “In the telecommunications sector, increasing UAV applications such as relay BSs, live data streaming and communication gateways are expected to model the growth in the UAV market [108].”
Deep Learning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Object Detection and Tracking: A survey (2021, background): “These data, either in content or time, are extremely informative, and, thus, object detection and tracking have entered the era of mass UAVs [1], [2], which have played an increasingly important role in land cover mapping [4], [5]; smart agriculture [6], [7]; smart cities [8]; traffic monitoring [6]”
Evolution of Non-Terrestrial Networks From 5G to 6G: A Survey (2021, background): “Other surveys, tutorials, and short review articles with little relevance to this survey can be found in [5], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26],”
A Comprehensive Survey on UAV Communication Channel Modeling (2019, background): “loon [44], the measured results for civil aeronautical communication would be referable for designing UAV communication, especially for large unmanned aircrafts.”
Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond (2019, background): “Prior work [32] gives a survey on UAV-aided civil applications, while the survey article [33] discusses other applications of UAVs and some promising technologies for them.”
A Survey on the Convergence of Edge Computing and AI for UAVs: Opportunities and Challenges (2022, background): “For example, paper [11] in the ﬁrst row considers the areas “UAV,” “UAV Technical Challenges,” and “UAV Applications” in high detail (dedicated sections or substantial subsections focused on the areas), considers the area “AI/ML” partially (mentioned in various parts of this article but in no…”
Security analysis of drones systems: Attacks, limitations, and recommendations (2020, neutral): “Many of these domains are mentioned and discussed in [51] , including search and rescue, and disaster management.”