A Survey of Unmanned Aircraft System Technologies to enable Safe Operations in Urban Areas

Abstract

The use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) is emerging more and more in recent years for many civil applications. They provide great opportunities in urban areas and, in particular, they will be involved in smart cities, bringing many advantages in terms of lower cost and operational flexibility. In this paper, we propose a survey of UAS technologies to enable safe flight operations in urban areas. The main goal of this paper is to investigate the most efficient solution to perform UAS missions and to manage aerial traffic in a future congested sky. The development of new mobile Internet technologies, the progress of UAS technology and the necessity to perform automatic/autonomous flight missions open new opportunities to UAS operations. Moreover, a revision of current UAS regulations is necessary.After a survey of UAS technologies, we discuss how the combination of an autonomous vehicle in Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight mode and a wireless connection with a mobile Internet connection could improve the UAS operations.