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

TLDR

Unmanned aerial vehicles are rapidly expanding across civil domains such as monitoring, coverage, sensing, rescue, delivery, security, agriculture, and infrastructure inspection, with smart UAVs poised to reduce risks and costs and driving a civil infrastructure market projected to exceed $45 billion. The paper surveys UAV civil applications, outlines their challenges, and discusses current research trends and future opportunities. The authors review recent literature to identify key challenges—charging, collision avoidance, swarming, networking, and security—and propose high‑level strategies for addressing them. The review highlights critical research gaps and offers high‑level insights on potential solutions to these 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 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.