A Comprehensive Review of UAV-UGV Collaboration: Advancements and Challenges

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) have rapidly evolved, becoming integral to various applications such as environmental monitoring, disaster response, and precision agriculture. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the advancements and the challenges in UAV-UGV collaboration and its potential applications. These systems offer enhanced situational awareness and operational efficiency, enabling complex tasks that are beyond the capabilities of individual systems by leveraging the complementary strengths of UAVs and UGVs. Key areas explored in this review include multi-UAV and multi-UGV systems, collaborative aerial and ground operations, and the communication and coordination mechanisms that support these collaborative efforts. Furthermore, this paper discusses potential limitations, challenges and future research directions, and considers issues such as computational constraints, communication network instability, and environmental adaptability. The review also provides a detailed analysis of how these issues impact the effectiveness of UAV-UGV collaboration.