Aerial Autonomy Under Adversity: Advances in Obstacle and Aircraft Detection Techniques for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have rapidly grown into different essential applications, including surveillance, disaster response, agriculture, and urban monitoring. However, for UAVS to steer safely and autonomously, the ability to detect obstacles and nearby aircraft remains crucial, especially under hard environmental conditions. This study comprehensively analyzes the recent landscape of obstacle and aircraft detection techniques tailored for UAVs acting in difficult scenarios such as fog, rain, smoke, low light, motion blur, and disorderly environments. It starts with a detailed discussion of key detection challenges and continues with an evaluation of different sensor types, from RGB and infrared cameras to LiDAR, radar, sonar, and event-based vision sensors. Both classical computer vision methods and deep learning-based detection techniques are examined in particular, highlighting their performance strengths and limitations under degraded sensing conditions. The paper additionally offers an overview of suitable UAV-specific datasets and the evaluation metrics generally used to evaluate detection systems. Finally, the paper examines open problems and coming research directions, emphasising the demand for lightweight, adaptive, and weather-resilient detection systems appropriate for real-time onboard processing. This study aims to guide students and engineers towards developing stronger and intelligent detection systems for next-generation UAV operations.