Swarm Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs): A Comprehensive Analysis of Localization, Recent Aspects, and Future Trends

Within the last decade, Swarm Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) are booming and growing at a surprisingly rapid pace. From military combat, environmental surveillance, and air transport to the blossoming public entertainment sector, there is a wide range of UAV applications. For these above use cases, the accurate location of the target of interest can be requested/queried, which is very important for their mission accomplishment. In the case of GPS-armed SUAVs, this is an easy task. However, the GPS signal can be obscured, affected by environmental conditions, or suppressive jamming. Therefore, location information needs to be improved/assisted by some other localization techniques, which constitutes the main scope of this article. Besides, with the advancements in localization, guidance, and communication technologies; future SUAVs will be operating autonomously by distributing tasks and coordinating the operation of many UAVs. Thus, UAV to UAV communication is presented as it constitutes the SUAV’s autonomous coordination ability. In addition, future research directions and open challenges that need to be addressed, including autonomous SUAVs, are also discussed.