Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have come in a great diversity of several applications such as military, construction, image and video mapping, medical, search and rescue, parcel delivery, hidden area exploration, oil rigs and power line monitoring, precision farming, wireless communication and aerial surveillance. The drone industry has been getting significant attention as a model of manufacturing, service and delivery convergence, introducing synergy with the coexistence of different emerging domains. UAVs offer implicit peculiarities such as increased airborne time and payload capabilities, swift mobility, and access to remote and disaster areas. Despite these potential features, including extensive variety of usage, high maneuverability, and cost-efficiency, drones are still limited in terms of battery endurance, flight autonomy and constrained flight time to perform persistent missions. Other critical concerns are battery endurance and the weight of drones, which must be kept low. Intuitively it is not suggested to load them with heavy batteries. This study highlights the importance of drones, goals and functionality problems. In this review, a comprehensive study on UAVs, swarms, types, classification, charging, and standardization is presented. In particular, UAV applications, challenges, and security issues are explored in the light of recent research studies and development. Finally, this review identifies the research gap and presents future research directions regarding UAVs.

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The groundbreaking Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) technology has gained significant attention from both academia and industrial experts due to several applications, such as military missions, power lines inspection, precision agriculture, remote sensing, delivery services, traffic monitoring and many more. UAVs are expected to become a mainstream delivery element by 2040 to address the ever-increasing demand for delivery services. Similarly, UAV-assisted monitoring approaches will automate the inspection process, lowering mission costs, increasing access to remote locations and saving time and energy. Despite the fact that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining popularity in both military and civilian applications, they have a number of limitations and critical problems that must be addressed in order for missions to be effective. One of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks is charging UAVs. UAVs’ mission length and travel distance are constrained by their low battery endurance. There is a need to study multi-UAV charging systems to overcome battery capacity limitations, allowing UAVs to be used for a variety of services while saving time and human resources. Wired and Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) systems have emerged as viable options to successfully solve this difficulty. In the past, several research surveys have focused on crucial aspects of wireless UAV charging. In this review, we have also examined the most emerging charging techniques for UAVs such as laser power transfer (LPT), distributed laser charging (DLC), simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and simultaneous light wave information and power transfer (SLIPT). The classification and types of UAVs, as well as various battery charging methods, are all discussed in this paper. We’ve also addressed a number of difficulties and solutions for safe operation. In the final section, we have briefly discussed future research directions.

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones have emerged as a ubiquitous and integral part of our society. They appear in great diversity in a multiplicity of applications for economic, commercial, leisure, military and academic purposes. The drone industry has seen a sharp uptake in the last decade as a model to manufacture and deliver convergence, offering synergy by incorporating multiple technologies. It is due to technological trends and rapid advancements in control, miniaturization, and computerization, which culminate in secure, lightweight, robust, more-accessible and cost-efficient UAVs. UAVs support implicit particularities including access to disaster-stricken zones, swift mobility, airborne missions and payload features. Despite these appealing benefits, UAVs face limitations in operability due to several critical concerns in terms of flight autonomy, path planning, battery endurance, flight time and limited payload carrying capability, as intuitively it is not recommended to load heavy objects such as batteries. As a result, the primary goal of this research is to provide insights into the potentials of UAVs, as well as their characteristics and functionality issues. This study provides a comprehensive review of UAVs, types, swarms, classifications, charging methods and regulations. Moreover, application scenarios, potential challenges and security issues are also examined. Finally, future research directions are identified to further hone the research work. We believe these insights will serve as guidelines and motivations for relevant researchers.

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG) have gained prominence in recent years, and their structural design is crucial for improvement of energy harvesting performance and sensing. Wearable biosensors can receive information about human health without the need for external charging, with energy instead provided by collection and storage modules that can be integrated into the biosensors. However, the failure to design suitable components for sensing remains a significant challenge associated with biomedical sensors. Therefore, design of TENG structures based on the human body is a considerable challenge, as biomedical sensors, such as implantable and wearable self-powered sensors, have recently advanced. Following a brief introduction of the fundamentals of triboelectric nanogenerators, we describe implantable and wearable self-powered sensors powered by triboelectric nanogenerators. Moreover, we examine the constraints limiting the practical uses of self-powered devices.

A intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can intelligently configure wavefronts such as amplitude, frequency, phase, and even polarization through passive reflections and without requiring any radio frequency (RF) chains. It is predicted to be a revolutionizing technology with the capability to alter wireless communication to enhance both spectrum and energy efficiencies with low expenditure and low energy consumption. Similarly, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication has attained a significant interest by research fraternity due to high mobility, flexible deployment, and easy integration with other technologies. However, UAV communication can face obstructions and eavesdropping in real-time scenarios. Recently, it is envisaged that IRS and UAV can combine together to achieve unparalleled opportunities in difficult environments. Both technologies can achieve enhanced performance by proactively altering the wireless propagation through maneuver control and smart signal reflections in three-dimensional space. This study briefly discusses IRS-assisted UAV communications. We survey the existing literature on this emerging research topic for both ground and airborne scenarios. We highlight several emerging technologies and application scenarios for future wireless networks. This study goes one step further to elaborate research opportunities to design and optimize wireless systems with low energy footprint and at low cost. Finally, we shed some light on open challenges and future research directions for IRS-assisted UAV communication.

This paper investigates and enhances unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relay-assisted free-space optics (FSO) optical wireless communication (OWC) systems under the effects of pointing errors (PEs) and atmospheric turbulences (ATs). The incorporation of UAVs as buffer-aided moving relays in the conventional FSO (CFSO) relay-assisted systems is proposed for enhancing the performance of PEs through AT. Using M-PSK (phase shift keying) and M-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation), the impact of PEs on transmission quality is evaluated in this work. We evaluate and optimize the symbol error rate, outage probability (OP), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the UAV-to-ground station-based FSO communications systems. The spatial diversity-based relay-assisted CFSO systems can enhance the performance of the UAV-UAV FSO links. In this paper, a new FSO (NFSO) channel model for the hovering UAV-FSO OWC fluctuations under the PEs, AT effects, jitter, deviation, receiving an error, and wind resistance effects are established. To improve the performance of hovering UAV-based FSO relay OWC systems. We reduce the influence of UAV-FSO OWC fluctuations under PEs and AT effects. By receiving incoherent signals at various locations, the spatial diversity-based relay-assisted NFSO systems can significantly increase the system's redundancy and enhance connection stability. Numerical results show that to achieve a bit-error-rate (BER) of $$\le 10^{ - 5}$$ ≤ 10 - 5 , the required SNR is ≥ 23 dB when the wind variance of the UAVs $$\sigma_{\alpha }^{2}$$ σ α 2 increases from 0 to 7 mrad with FSO link distance L = 2000 m. The required SNR is ≥ 25 dB when the wind variance $$\sigma_{\alpha }^{2}$$ σ α 2 is 1 mrad at an OP of $$10^{ - 6}$$ 10 - 6 . To obtain an average BER of $$10^{ - 6}$$ 10 - 6 , the SNR should be 16.23 dB, 17.64 dB, and 21.45 dB when $$\sigma_{\alpha }^{2}$$ σ α 2 is 0 mrad, 1 mrad, and 2 mrad, respectively. Using 8-PSK modulation without PEs requires 23.5 dB at BER of $$10^{ - 8}$$ 10 - 8 while 16-QAM without PEs requires 26.5 dB to maintain the same BER of $$10^{ - 8}$$ 10 - 8 . Compared with 16-QAM without PEs, the SNR gain of 8-PSK without PEs is 3 dB. The results show the relay-assisted UAV-FSO system with five stationary relays can achieve BER $$10^{ - 8}$$ 10 - 8 at 25 dB SNR in the ideal case and $$10^{ - 5}$$ 10 - 5 at 27 dB SNR with AT and PE at FSO length 1000 m. The results show the relay UAV-FSO system outperforms the CFSO at the BER and SNR performance. The effects of UAV’FSO s fluctuation increase when the UAV-FSO link length, $${\text{L}}_{{{\text{fso}}}}$$ L fso increases. The results of the weak turbulence achieve better SER compared with MT and ST. The obtained results show that decreasing $${\text{L}}_{{{\text{fso}}}}$$ L fso can compensate for the effects of UAV-FSO link fluctuation on the proposed system. Finally, we investigated the CFSO relay-assisted UAV-FSO system with aided NFSO-UAVs spatial diversity-based relay-based on NFSO OWC and revealed the benefits of the resulting hybrid architecture.

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