Metrology for drone and drone for metrology: Measurement systems on small civilian drones

The application fields of modern Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), such as light Remotely Piloted Systems, are moving from military fields to a wide range of civilian applications. These platforms embed several sensors that enable the use of UAVs as remote measurement systems. This paper deals with a survey of measurement applications based on UAV. In the first part, several classifications of UAVs are reported. Then, the architectural overview of a quadrotor UAV and several examples of measurement systems embedded on drone for indoor and outdoor navigation are described. In the last part, a review of civilian applications using the drone as remote measurement system is presented and discussed.