Unmanned Aerial Systems for the Oil and Gas Industry: Overview, Applications, and Challenges

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) represent an evolving technology with enormous potential to revolutionize the oil and gas industry by providing a more efficient, fast, safe, and cost-effective way to perform a variety of field activities. Recently, UAS has received considerable attention from the oil and gas industry. The objective of this review article is to highlight the usability of UAS for the oil and gas industry, focussing mainly on UAS applications and the opportunities and challenges of UAS deployment in such oil and gas applications. Additionally, this paper also covers the available sensory systems for UAS and provides some recommendations to select a UAS for a given oil and gas application.