  Natural and human-made disasters have dramatically increased during the last
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 Vehicles
(UAVs)-based solutions are the most promising candidates to take up on the
localization challenge by leveraging on emerging technologies such as:
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) and
Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) modulations. In this paper, 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.
