Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Consumer Applications: New Applications in Current and Future Smart Environments

The advances in communication, computation, and sensing technologies have led researchers, academics, and aircraft industries to strive to design efficient enabling technologies for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). UAVs are being deployed for surveillance, monitoring, and various other operations in a wide range of military, consumer, and commercial applications. A web of UAVs forming a heterogeneous network offers a dynamic solution for providing wireless and Internet connectivity to devices, sensors, and machines in various situations, such as during natural disasters and over mountainous terrain, among others. Thus, achieving high-speed wireless communication for nextgeneration communication systems (5G) has emerged as one of the applications of UAVs. Remote sensing and surveillance as well as critical infrastructure monitoring and control are further applications that UAV technologies are disrupting. © 2012 IEEE.