Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are becoming increasingly popular in the public safety sector. While some applications have so far only been envisioned, others are regularly performed in real-life scenarios. Many more fall in between and are actively investigated by research and commercial communities alike. This study reviews the maturity levels, or “market-readiness”, of public safety applications for UAS. As individual assessments of all applications suggested in the literature are infeasible due to their sheer number, we propose a novel set of application categories: Remote Sensing, Mapping, Monitoring, Human-drone Interaction, Flying Ad-hoc Networks, Transportation, and Counter UAV Systems. Each category’s maturity is assessed through a literature review of contained applications, using the metric of Application Readiness Levels (ARLs). Relevant aspects such as the environmental complexity and available mission time of addressed scenarios are taken into account. Following the analysis, we infer that improvements in autonomy and software reliability are the most promising research areas for increasing the usefulness and acceptance of UAS in the public safety domain.

Mobile robotics is a widespread field of research, whose differentiation from general robotics is often based only on the ability to move. However, mobile robots need unique capabilities, such as the function of navigation. Also, there are limiting factors, such as the typically limited energy, which must be considered when developing a mobile robot. This article deals with the definition of an archetypal robot, which is represented in the form of a taxonomy. Types and fields of application are defined. A systematic literature review is carried out for the definition of typical capabilities and implementations, where reference systems, textbooks, and literature references are considered.

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