Utilization and Potentials of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the Field of Automated Driving: A Survey

The number of existing UAVs in the private and commercial sector has steadily increased in recent years and is expected to experience strong growth in the future. However, so far there is little research on the use of UAVs in connection with automated driving. In this paper, we first analyze existing research and the current state of the art in the use of UAVs in the transport sector. Then we list possible potentials how UAVs can be used in the field of automated driving. We focus on the four sub-areas of the transport sector a) surveillance, b) road user detection and tracking, c) wireless communication and V2X and d) infrastructure mapping. The elaborations show that the use of UAVs in all four sub-areas can contribute significantly to enable and safeguard automated driving. In sub-area a), UAVs for example can support intelligent parking space monitoring and enable functions such as automated valet parking. In sub-area b), UAVs are particularly suitable for collecting naturalistic trajectories of road users, which are stored as datasets and serve to develop and safeguard automated driving functions. By using UAVs in sub-area c), long distances can be bridged and new, previously unattainable areas can be made accessible for communication applications. Finally, UAVs can also be used in sub-area d) to easily map new areas or to improve and continuously update existing digital HD maps. It has been further shown in literature that UAVs are partly superior to conventional vehicle environment perception methods due to their low cost factor, their ease of use and especially due to their comparatively large area of sensor coverage.