Systematic literature review of applications and usage potentials for the combination of unmanned aerial vehicles and mobile robot manipulators in production systems

The cooperation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Mobile Robot Manipulators (MRMs) offers enormous possibilities to modern industry. It paves the way for logistics, cooperative assembling or manipulation and will provide even more flexibility and autonomy to today’s manufacturing processes. Currently, some systematic literature reviews exist that provide an overview on research fields and gaps in the field of UAVs and MRMs. However, an investigation of the research landscape for combined use of UAVs and MRMs does not exist to the best of the authors’ knowledge. Therefore, in this paper, a systematic review of the current research landscape for the combined use of UAV and MRM is conducted to finally identify fields of action that need to be addressed in the future to harness the full potential.