Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are becoming increasingly popular in the public safety sector. While some applications have so far only been envisioned, others are regularly performed in real-life scenarios. Many more fall in between and are actively investigated by research and commercial communities alike. This study reviews the maturity levels, or “market-readiness”, of public safety applications for UAS. As individual assessments of all applications suggested in the literature are infeasible due to their sheer number, we propose a novel set of application categories: Remote Sensing, Mapping, Monitoring, Human-drone Interaction, Flying Ad-hoc Networks, Transportation, and Counter UAV Systems. Each category’s maturity is assessed through a literature review of contained applications, using the metric of Application Readiness Levels (ARLs). Relevant aspects such as the environmental complexity and available mission time of addressed scenarios are taken into account. Following the analysis, we infer that improvements in autonomy and software reliability are the most promising research areas for increasing the usefulness and acceptance of UAS in the public safety domain.
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Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This research has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the framework of Software4Robots (BMBF, project number 13FH009IX6).
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Conceptualization: Merlin Stampa; Project administration: Merlin Stampa; Methodology: Merlin Stampa, Carsten Wolff; Investigation – literature search: Merlin Stampa; Investigation – data analysis: Merlin Stampa, Andreas Sutorma, Uwe Jahn; Visualization: Merlin Stampa; Writing – original draft preparation: Merlin Stampa; Writing – review and editing: Merlin Stampa, Andreas Sutorma, Uwe Jahn, Jörg Thiem, Carsten Wolff, Christof Röhrig; Funding acquisition: Carsten Wolff, Christof Röhrig, Jörg Thiem; Resources: Carsten Wolff, Christof Röhrig, Jörg Thiem; Supervision: Christof Röhrig.
All authors are engaged in the joint research project Software4Robots, which provided the framework for this study.
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Appendix A: Details of the Literature Searches
Appendix A: Details of the Literature Searches
Table 2 lists the search terms used for the literature reviews in this study. Also listed are the numbers of results considered for our assessments. The academic search engines we employed offer varying options to search specific fields of their databases. In Table 2, we use the following markers to denote which fields were searched:
T: Title. On IEEE Xplore this is equivalent to the option “Document Title”, on arXiv to “title”, and to “allintitle” on Google Scholar. A: Abstract or metadata. IEEE Xplore offers “All Metadata”, arXiv “Abstract”. Google Scholar does not provide this option, so it searched for the terms in the entire document.
We use uas_terms to abbreviate the following query:
UAS OR "unmanned aerial system" OR UAV OR "unmanned aerial vehicle" OR RPAS OR "remotely piloted aircraft system" OR drone*
On Google Scholar, only the shorter terms (UAS, UAV, RPAS, drone⋆) were used in order to stay within the character limit.
ps_terms is used to abbreviate:
"public safety" OR "civil security" OR "humanitarian relief" OR disaster OR emergency OR fire OR rescue OR police
The application categories Remote Sensing, Human-drone Interaction, and Transportation (Sections 5.1, 5.4, and 5.6) already reached ARL 9 through the examined reviews (Section 3) and articles we had archived from previous works of ours, so we omitted detailed searches for them.
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Stampa, M., Sutorma, A., Jahn, U. et al. Maturity Levels of Public Safety Applications using Unmanned Aerial Systems: a Review. J Intell Robot Syst 103, 16 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01462-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01462-7