A Survey on UAV Applications in Smart City Management: Challenges, Advances, and Opportunities

Smart management of urban space is an important way to achieve the goal of sustainable urban development. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in urban space management work and have greatly improved the level of it. UAV technology assisting urban space management involves many technical details and has generated a number of problems. Therefore, a systematic review of the applications of UAVs in urban spatial management work is very necessary and can provide a comprehensive reference for relevant researchers. This is conducive to the generation of more new insights, methods, and applications. However, according to our research, there is a lack of relevant systematic investigation. We screened and researched a large number of relevant literature works (about 230) with the help of search tools, such as Web of Science and IEEE Xplore, and combined with our own working experience to review and summarize the field in an all-round way. Taking the definition, needs, and challenges of urban spatial management as an entry point, this article systematically summarizes the task flow, working paradigm, technical system, and application direction of UAV-assisted urban spatial management. It also takes our recently developed UAV urban management system as an example to provide an introduction on how to integrate advanced technologies such as UAV and artificial intelligence. Finally, this article summarizes several concluding findings and proposes several future research directions. The research in this article shows that UAV technology has already played a great role in urban spatial management work, but it is still far from realizing automation and intelligence, and it needs to continue to make efforts in terms of methods, systems, applications, and policies. In order to achieve these goals, UAV technology can be further integrated with advanced technologies such as deep learning, more types of UAV industry applications can be carried out, a more functional unmanned aircraft system can be developed, and better management policies can be formulated.