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

TL;DR

This survey reviews civil applications of UAVs, highlights current research challenges like charging and collision avoidance, and discusses future directions for integrating UAVs into civil infrastructure.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of UAV civil applications, identifies key research challenges, and offers insights into future research directions.

Findings

UAVs are increasingly used in civil infrastructure and monitoring.

Major challenges include charging, collision avoidance, and security.

Future research should focus on addressing these key challenges.

Abstract

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 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 the more that $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. In this survey, we present UAV civil applications and their challenges. We also discuss 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.