Post‐disaster assessment with unmanned aerial vehicles: A survey on practical implementations and research approaches

Abstract In this paper, we provide a review of the principal aspects related to search & rescue (SAR) with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), with particular interest in the phase of post‐disaster assessment (PDA). Some areas of interest related to this topic have been chosen for the analysis: the aerial platforms used in the field, multirobot software architectures, onboard sensors and simultaneous localization and mapping approaches, terrain coverage algorithms, autonomous navigation techniques, and human‐swarm interfaces. All these aspects have been analyzed with respect to the state‐of‐the‐art, and also in relation to the project PRISMA, which focuses on the development and deployment of robots and autonomous systems that can operate in emergency scenarios, with a specific reference to monitoring and real‐time intervention.