Indoor autonomous multi-UAVs: A review of current research, enabling technologies and open challenges
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Date
2025
Authors
Haider, Zarrar
Sreenan, Cormac J.
Brown, Kenneth N.
O'Mahony, Aidan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Published Version
Abstract
The utilization of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased in recent years for various tasks in indoor environments, including inventory management, rapid emergency response, underground inspections, warehouse monitoring, payload delivery, surveillance, and real-time mapping. Robust control systems are essential for reliable and safe operation in indoor environments. The use of these systems in the indoor environment requires autonomy, scalability, and efficiency to perform the assigned tasks with robustness. At present, a large number of researchers and scholars have shown growing interest in various key research factors for indoor multi-UAV operations. However, multi-UAV operations pose critical challenges in indoor environments owing to congested spaces, dynamic obstacles, and static hindrances such as walls. These challenge areas include a range of various factors, including sensing, communication, obstacle avoidance, control systems, networking, mission planning, and computational complexities. This paper presents a review of research on indoor autonomous multi-UAV systems and synthesizes existing work on obstacle avoidance, sensing capabilities, networking, and mission planning. This research systematically reviews the current methodologies in each area, benchmarks performance in each domain, and highlights the key contributions, challenges addressed, strengths, and limitations of existing solutions. In addition, this study explores the potential of emerging technologies, such as edge computing and machine learning, to enable advanced solutions for research challenges and their integration into future systems. Finally, the paper identifies key research challenges that can be addressed through the utilization of emerging technologies to develop effective autonomous multi-UAV systems for indoor environments.
Description
Keywords
Autonomous multi-UAVs , Edge computing , Indoor autonomy , Indoor environment , Indoor localization , Intelligent UAVs , Machine learning , Mission planning , UAVs networking , Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
Citation
Haider, Z., Sreenan, C. J., Brown, K. N. and O’Mahony, A. (2025) 'Indoor autonomous multi-UAVs: A review of current research, enabling technologies and open challenges', IEEE Access, 13, pp. 212231-212265. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3642189