UAV in the advent of the twenties: Where we stand and what is next

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has surged in the last two decades, making them popular instruments for a wide range of applications, and leading to a remarkable number of scientific contributions in geoscience, remote sensing and engineering. However, the development of best practices for high quality of UAV mapping are often overlooked representing a drawback for their wider adoption. UAV solutions then require an inter-disciplinary research, integrating different expertise and combining several hardware and software components on the same platform. Despite the high number of peer-reviewed papers on UAVs, little attention has been given to the interaction between research topics from different…