AERIAL: A Meta Review and Discussion of Challenges Toward Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Operations in Logistics, Mobility, and Monitoring

There exists a tremendous number of research surveys on various aspects of UAV logistics, mobility and monitoring tasks in the literature. These surveys have been published in distinct venues, often having a significant overlap in goals and key findings. In this study, we provide a meta review across nearly 100 extant UAV surveys and overview papers, extract their key messages, and investigate the extent of being complementary. We develop the AERIAL framework, which aggregates the major challenges on the way to a successful application of UAVs for logistics, mobility, and monitoring. We believe that AERIAL framework and meta review contribute towards a clearer understanding of the scientific UAV landscape challenges and the identification of potential directions for future research studies.