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A control and communications platform for procedural mission planning with multiple aerial drones

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Abstract

Leveraging recent advances in autonomous flight capabilities of commercially available drone equipment, we report on the development of a modular solution for multi-drone control that implements the functionality required for planning, execution, and monitoring of procedural, multi-step missions with optional drone cooperation. The platform consists of loosely coupled components interacting via message brokers, which we evaluate through a pair of real-life experiments that emulate reference use-cases. We then look into the performance of drone-to-ground communications, with a particular focus on latency. We implement a dedicated, low-resource communications module with efficient serialization protocols and asynchronous message handling, to compare against the built-in message broker approach. Our data shows the importance of low-level prioritization of drone control requests and indicates that message broker approaches may not be suitable for drone swarms.

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Funding

This work is supported by the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), through the Regional Operational Programme of Lisbon (POR LISBOA 2020) and the Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Programme (COMPETE 2020) of the Portugal 2020 framework (Project 5G with Nr. 024539 (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-024539)), and also by FCT/MEC through national funds under the project PTDC/EEI-ROB/28799/2017.

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  1. Instituto de Telecomunicações, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    B. Areias, A. Martins, N. Paula, A. B. Reis & S. Sargento

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  1. B. Areias
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  2. A. Martins
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  3. N. Paula
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  4. A. B. Reis
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  5. S. Sargento
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Correspondence to S. Sargento.

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Areias, B., Martins, A., Paula, N. et al. A control and communications platform for procedural mission planning with multiple aerial drones. Pers Ubiquit Comput 26, 1105–1115 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-020-01378-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-020-01378-3

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