TY  - EJOU
AU  - Wang, Yaolei 
AU  - Li, Wangyan 
AU  - Wei, Guoliang 

TI  - Recent Advances in UAV-Based SLAM: A Survey
T2  - Computers, Materials \& Continua

PY  - 
VL  - 
IS  - 
SN  - 1546-2226

AB  - With the rapid development of <i>unmanned aerial vehicle</i> (UAV) technologies, <i>simultaneous localization and mapping</i> (SLAM) has emerged as a key enabling paradigm for autonomous navigation and environmental perception. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent trends in UAV-based SLAM. First, we review the fundamental components of UAV-based SLAM systems, including commonly used onboard sensors and front-end odometry methods such as visual odometry, visual-inertial odometry, and LiDAR-inertial odometry, which provide reliable ego-motion estimation. Next, we summarize back-end methodologies that enhance estimation accuracy and global consistency, covering pose graph optimization, 3D reconstruction techniques, filter-based SLAM, fusion-based multi-UAV SLAM, and emerging blockchain-enabled frameworks for secure and distributed mapping. Furthermore, representative application scenarios are discussed, including a newly proposed category of collaborative UAV-SLAM platforms, termed the UAV-plus system. We also identify several remaining research gaps and highlight future research directions, including observability challenges, operation in imperfect and dynamic environments, and the miniaturization of UAV-based SLAM systems.
KW  - UAV-based SLAM; multi-UAV systems; distributed UAV-based SLAM; front-end odometry; pose graph optimization; 3D reconstruction; sensor fusion; blockchain; back-end optimization

DO  - 10.32604/cmc.2026.085054