mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

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

arXiv 1805.00881 ↗First posted 19 Apr 2018cs.ROcited by 54

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Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 54 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2018.

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 10; 2022: 7; 2023: 6; 2024: 10; 2025: 12; 2026: 9.

54 papers.

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  1. 2021Deep Learning for UAV-based Object Detection and Tracking: A Surveycited by 33
  2. 2021An Autonomous Drone for Search and Rescue in Forests using Airborne Optical Sectioningcited by 32
  3. 2024HAZARD Challenge: Embodied Decision Making in Dynamically Changing Environmentscited by 32
  4. 2025UAVScenes: A Multi-Modal Dataset for UAVscited by 27
  5. 2022A Survey on Large-Population Systems and Scalable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 14
  6. 2024Generative AI for Unmanned Vehicle Swarms: Challenges, Applications and Opportunitiescited by 14
  7. 2025UAV-VLN: End-to-End Vision Language guided Navigation for UAVscited by 11
  8. 2025From Prompts to Protection: Large Language Model-Enabled In-Context Learning for Smart Public Safety UAVcited by 10
  9. 2025Next-Generation LLM for UAV: From Natural Language to Autonomous Flightcited by 10
  10. 2022Adaptive Path Planning for UAVs for Multi-Resolution Semantic Segmentationcited by 8
  11. 2022UAVs Beneath the Surface: Cooperative Autonomy for Subterranean Search and Rescue in DARPA SubTcited by 7
  12. 2023NOMAD: A Natural, Occluded, Multi-scale Aerial Dataset, for Emergency Response Scenarioscited by 4
38 more
  1. 2024Deep Reinforcement Learning for Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer of VTOL-UAVs Offshore Docking Operationscited by 4
  2. 2021Distributed Reinforcement Learning for Flexible and Efficient UAV Swarm Controlcited by 3
  3. 2021Nearest-Neighbor-based Collision Avoidance for Quadrotors via Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
  4. 2021Resilient UAV Swarm Communications with Graph Convolutional Neural Networkcited by 3
  5. 2021Track Boosting and Synthetic Data Aided Drone Detectioncited by 3
  6. 2024Leveraging Edge Intelligence and LLMs to Advance 6G-Enabled Internet of Automated Defense Vehiclescited by 3
  7. 2021ReS2tAC -- UAV-Borne Real-Time SGM Stereo Optimized for Embedded ARM and CUDA Devicescited by 2
  8. 2022A Search and Detection Autonomous Drone System: from Design to Implementationcited by 2
  9. 2023Diffusion Models for Multi-target Adversarial Trackingcited by 2
  10. 2023Autonomous Advanced Aerial Mobility -- An End-to-end Autonomy Framework for UAVs and Beyondcited by 2
  11. 2024Towards Engineering Fair and Equitable Software Systems for Managing Low-Altitude Airspace Authorizationscited by 2
  12. 2024Learning-augmented Online Minimization of Age of Information and Transmission Costscited by 2
  13. 2024EVD4UAV: An Altitude-Sensitive Benchmark to Evade Vehicle Detection in UAVcited by 2
  14. 2025Vision-Based Risk Aware Emergency Landing for UAVs in Complex Urban Environmentscited by 2
  15. 2021Efficient UAV Trajectory-Planning using Economic Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
  16. 2021A Multi-UAV System for Exploration and Target Finding in Cluttered and GPS-Denied Environmentscited by 1
  17. 2022UAV Base Station Trajectory Optimization Based on Reinforcement Learning in Post-disaster Search and Rescue Operationscited by 1
  18. 2022Sequence Models for Drone vs Bird Classificationcited by 1
  19. 2023Energy-Efficient Cellular-Connected UAV Swarm Control Optimizationcited by 1
  20. 2024Multistatic-Radar RCS-Signature Recognition of Aerial Vehicles: A Bayesian Fusion Approachcited by 1
  21. 2024AI-Driven Human-Autonomy Teaming in Tactical Operations: Proposed Framework, Challenges, and Future Directionscited by 1
  22. 2025ViVa-SAFELAND: a New Freeware for Safe Validation of Vision-based Navigation in Aerial Vehiclescited by 1
  23. 2025Generative Adversarial Evasion and Out-of-Distribution Detection for UAV Cyber-Attackscited by 1
  24. 2021Oil and Gas Pipeline Monitoring during COVID-19 Pandemic via Unmanned Aerial Vehiclecited by 0
  25. 2022See as a Bee: UV Sensor for Aerial Strawberry Crop Monitoringcited by 0
  26. 2023Decentralized federated learning methods for reducing communication cost and energy consumption in UAV networkscited by 0
  27. 2023A Decentralized Spike-based Learning Framework for Sequential Capture in Discrete Perimeter Defense Problemcited by 0
  28. 2024Psych-Occlusion: Using Visual Psychophysics for Aerial Detection of Occluded Persons during Search and Rescuecited by 0
  29. 2025Dynamics-Invariant Quadrotor Control using Scale-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
  30. 2025Learning Agile Tensile Perching for Aerial Robots from Demonstrationscited by 0
  31. 2025Maximizing UAV Cellular Connectivity with Reinforcement Learning for BVLoS Path Planningcited by 0
  32. 2025Diffuse to Detect: A Generalizable Framework for Anomaly Detection with Diffusion Models Applications to UAVs and Beyondcited by 0
  33. 2025LEARN: Learning End-to-End Aerial Resource-Constrained Multi-Robot Navigationcited by 0
  34. 2026DDSA: Dual-Domain Strategic Attack for Spatial-Temporal Efficiency in Adversarial Robustness Testingcited by 0
  35. 2026AI-Empowered UAV-Assisted Backscatter Localization and ISAC for Zero-Energy IoT: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 0
  36. 2026Zero-Shot Mission-Level Evaluation for Aerial MLLM Agentscited by 0
  37. 2026AgilePE: Autonomous UAV Pursuit-Evasion via Self-Play Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
  38. 2026AirAlign: Geometry-Aware Relative Pose Alignment for UAV Last-Meter Navigationcited by 0

50 most cited of 54 All 54 (JSON)