An Architectural Design for Autonomous and Networked Drones

Abstract

Drone technology is evolving rapidly, offering support for many new applications every day. Off-the-shelf drone products accessible at reasonable costs are enabling new applications and research directions from crowd management, product delivery, and smart cities to security and military applications. The potential of autonomous swarm missions opens up new research avenues; however, off-the-shelf drone products, as well as most commercial projects, lack features that are required by autonomous collective multi drone missions. One potential reason is that there is no consensus on how to develop drones with cooperative operation capacity systemically. This study suggests a generalized device architecture concerning both hardware and software organization to aid developers of cooperative drones designed for multi-drone missions. The proposed architecture grants autonomy and cooperation within a swarm. An additional solution is also provided to enable ad-hoc networking for drones when the drone platform does not natively support it. The architecture is developed and deployed on ModalAI VOXL m500 developer drone to achieve cooperative swarm sensing and is validated through use cases.