Post-disaster assessment with unmanned aerial vehicles: A survey on practical implementations and research approaches

In this paper, we provide a review of the principal aspects related to search & rescue (SAR) with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), with particular interest in the phase of post-disaster assessment (PDA). Some areas of interest related to this topic have been chosen for the analysis: the aerial platforms used in the field, multirobot software architectures, onboard sensors and simultaneous localization and mapping approaches, terrain coverage algorithms, autonomous navigation techniques, and human-swarm interfaces. All these aspects have been analyzed with respect to the state-of-the-art, and also in relation to the project PRISMA, which focuses on the development and deployment of robots and autonomous systems that can operate in emergency scenarios, with a specific reference to monitoring and real-time intervention.