Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Aided Intelligent Transportation Systems: Vision, Challenges, and Opportunities

With their inherent attributes such as mobility, flexibility, and adaptive altitude, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can potentially enable Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) to be more efficient by playing the role of aerial base stations for data collection, data analysis, and communication networks. Their ability to access hard-to-reach locations makes UAVs helpful in emergencies to search for and assess damages/accidents and support communication relays in disrupted infrastructures. Although there is a rising interest in the application of UAVs in the realm of ITS, a comprehensive survey that consolidates existing contributions is noticeably absent. This paper fulfils this research gap by investigating the contributions of UAVs in diverse domains of ITS. We divide existing works into three main categories: Functionality Level, Application Level, and Planning Level. For each category, this paper explores the tasks that UAVs enable in ITS and describes the related proposed schemes. Furthermore, various simulation testbeds and datasets used for the implementation and evaluation of UAV-enabled ITS are described. Based on the identified challenges, we provide recommendations for future research.