Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Literature Review

Abstract

In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have grown and increased in applications because of computational simplicity and adaptive control capacity with strong support from both civilian and military sectors. The applications of UAVs in various military, commercial and civilian areas have led to sustainable results. The application areas include but are not limited to oil & gas, cargo transport, geographic mapping, aerial photography, health care, and disaster management. The success of the UAV application missions is completely dependent on the accuracy in control provided by the flight controllers. Thus, there is a need for accurate, robust, and adaptive flight controllers. UAV dynamics modeling and identification and control of these vehicles are still major active areas of research and development. They pose severe challenges due to the vehicle's complex design, inherently nonlinear, and time-varying dynamics. The main goal of this paper is to identify the past research trends and recent improvements in UAVs. Furthermore, this paper discusses a comprehensive literature review according to the optimized objectives, solution techniques, and applications of UAVs such as Cargo Transport, Disaster Management, etc. According to the literature review, aerial photography is one of the applications of smart UAVs. The reliability of image matching across multiple camera perspectives, angles, and positions encourages computer vision approaches for UAV navigation, opening the way for future researchers to develop vision applications. This article presents a comprehensive literature review discussing the importance of UAV applications related to cost-effectiveness and versatility. Furthermore, a detailed survey of system modeling identification and control techniques is presented.