Internet of Things (IoT)-Enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for the Inspection of Construction Sites: A Vision and Future Directions

Abstract

Today people are witnessing the rapid evolvement in every area. This is because of the emerging trends in communication technology and autonomous unmanned vehicles. These trends have led us towards the high standards of health, energy, transportation, monitoring, and surveillance of huge domestic and industrial projects. Thus, this review paper presents the integration of the latest trend in communication technology, i.e., Internet of things (IoT) with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This manuscript not only reviews the use of IoT-enabled unmanned aerial vehicles for inspecting the several construction sites but also emphasizes the utilization of such IoT-enabled autonomous aerial vehicles for ensuring the health and safety measures at the site. It discusses the major limitations and shortcomings of state-of-the-art techniques for the same purpose, i.e., optimization issues in path planning, lightweight artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision algorithms, coordination in communication using IoT, and scalability of IoT network. Thus, this paper shall help the reader to explore different open research problems in-depth.