First Responders Got Wings: UAVs to the Rescue of Localization Operations in Beyond 5G Systems

Natural and human-made disasters have dramatically increased in recent decades. Given the strong relationship between first responders' localization time and the final number of deaths, the modernization of search and rescue operations has become imperative. In this context, unmanned-aerial-vehicle-based solutions are the most promising candidates to take on the localization challenge by leveraging emerging technologies such as artificial Intelligence, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, and orthogonal time-frequency space modulations. In this article, we capitalize on such recently available techniques by shedding light on the main challenges and future opportunities to boost the localization performance of state-of-the-art techniques to give birth to unprecedentedly effective missing victims localization solutions.