Above and Beyond: A Scoping Review of Domains and Applications for Human-Drone Interaction

Interacting with flying objects has fueled people’s imagination throughout history. Over the past decade, the Human-Drone Interaction (HDI) community has been working towards making this dream a reality. Despite notable findings, we lack a high-level perspective on the current and future use cases for interacting with drones. We present a holistic view of domains and applications of use that are described, studied, and envisioned in the HDI body of work. To map the extent and nature of the prior research, we performed a scoping review (N=217). We identified 16 domains and over 100 applications where drones and people interact together. We then describe in depth the main domains and applications reported in the literature and further present under-explored use cases with great potential. We conclude with fundamental challenges and opportunities for future research in the field. This work contributes a systematic step towards increased replicability and generalizability of HDI research.