One of the major restrictions on the practical applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is their incomplete self-sufficiency, which makes continuous operations infeasible without human oversights. The more oversight UAVs require, the less likely they are going to be commercially advantageous when compared to their alternatives. As an autonomous system, how much human interaction is needed to function is one of the best indicators evaluating the limitations and inefficiencies of the UAVs. Popular UAV related research areas, such as path planning and computer vision, have enabled substantial advances in the ability of drones to act on their own. This research is dedicated to in-flight operations, in which there is not much reported effort to tackle the problem from the aspect of the supportive infrastructure. In this paper, an Autonomous Service network infrastructure (AutoServe) is proposed. Aiming at increasing the future autonomy of UAVs, the AutoServe system includes a service-oriented landing platform and a customized communication protocol. This supportive AutoServe infrastructure will autonomize many tasks currently done manually by human operators, such as battery replacement. A proof-of-concept prototype has been built and the simulation experimental study validated the design.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to play an important role in next generation cellular networks, acting as flying infrastructure which can serve ground users when regular infrastructure is overloaded or unavailable. As these devices are expected to operate wirelessly they will rely on an internal battery for their power supply, which will limit the amount of time they can operate over an area of interest before having to recharge. In this article, we outline three battery charging options that may be considered by a network operator and use simulations to demonstrate the performanc…
This paper investigates moving networks of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), such as drones, as one of the innovative opportunities brought by the 5G. With a main purpose to extend connectivity and guarantee data rates, the drones require hovering locations due to limitations such as flight time and coverage surface. We provide analytic bounds on the requirements in terms of connectivity extension for vehicular networks served by fixed Enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) infrastructure, where both vehicular networks and infrastructures are modeled using stochastic and fractal geometry as a model f…
We design and build SKYHAUL, the first large-scale, autonomous, self-organizing network of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that are connected using a mmWave wireless mesh backhaul. While the use of a mmWave backhaul paves the way for a new class of bandwidth-intensive, latency-sensitive cooperative applications (e.g., LTE coverage during disasters, surveillance during rescue in challenging terrains), the network of UAVs allows these applications to be executed at operating ranges that are far beyond the line-of-sight distances that limit individual UAVs today. To realize the challenging vision…
Radio Environmental Maps (REMs) are a powerful tool for enhancing the performance of various communication and networked agents. However, generating REMs is a laborious undertaking, especially in complex 3-Dimensional (3D) environments, such as indoors. To address this issue, we propose a system for autonomous generation of fine-grained REMs of indoor 3D spaces. In the system, multiple small indoor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are sequentially used for 3D sampling of signal quality indicators. The collected readings are streamlined to a Machine Learning (ML) system for its training and, onc…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely deployed to enhance the wireless network capacity and to provide communication services to mobile users beyond the infrastructure coverage. Recently, with the help of a promising technology called network virtualization, multiple service providers (SPs) can share the infrastructures and wireless resources owned by the mobile network operators (MNOs). Then, they provide specific services to their mobile users using the resources obtained from MNOs. However, wireless resource sharing among SPs is challenging as each SP wants to maximize their utility/pr…
This paper studies the problem of spectrum shortage in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network during critical missions such as wildfire monitoring, search and rescue, and disaster monitoring. Such applications involve a high demand for high-throughput data transmissions such as real-time video-, image-, and voice- streaming where the assigned spectrum to the UAV network may not be adequate to provide the desired Quality of Service (QoS). In these scenarios, the aerial network can borrow an additional spectrum from the available terrestrial networks in the trade of a relaying service for them…
As an emerging field of aerial robotics, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant research interest within the wireless networking research community. As soon as national legislations allow UAVs to fly autonomously, we will see swarms of UAV populating the sky of our smart cities to accomplish different missions: parcel delivery, infrastructure monitoring, event filming, surveillance, tracking, etc. The UAV ecosystem can benefit from existing 5G/B5G cellular networks, which can be exploited in different ways to enhance UAV communications. Because of the inherent characteristics …
Cellular networks are expected to be the main communication infrastructure to support the expanding applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). As these networks are deployed to serve ground User Equipment (UES), several issues need to be addressed to enhance cellular UAVs'services.In this paper, we propose a realistic communication model on the downlink,and we show that the Quality of Service (QoS)for the users is affected by the number of interfering BSs and the impact they cause. The joint problem of sub-carrier and power allocation is therefore addressed. Given its complexity, which i…
PerceptIn（感知创新公司）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
The infrastructure-vehicle cooperative autonomous driving approach depends on the cooperation between intelligent roads and intelligent vehicles. This approach is not only safer but also more economical compared to the traditional on-vehicle-only autonomous driving approach. In this paper, we introduce our real-world deployment experiences of cooperative autonomous driving, and delve into the details of new challenges and opportunities. Specifically, based on our progress towards commercial deployment, we follow a three-stage development roadmap of the cooperative autonomous driving approach:i…
The ever-evolving internet of things (IoT) has led to the growth of numerous wireless sensors, communicating through the internet infrastructure. When designing a network using these sensors, one critical aspect is the longevity and self-sustainability of these devices. For extending the lifetime of these sensors, radio frequency energy harvesting (RFEH) technology has proved to be promising. In this paper, we propose CURE, a novel framework for RFEH that effectively combines the benefits of cell-free massive MIMO (CFmMIMO), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and reconfigurable intelligent surfa…
Infrastructure assistance has been proposed as a viable solution to improve the capabilities of commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), especially toward fully autonomous operations. The airborne nature of these devices imposes constrains limiting the onboard available energy supply and computing power. The assistance of the surrounding communication and computing infrastructure can mitigate such limitations by extending the communication range and taking over the execution of compute-intense tasks. However, autonomous operations impose specific, and rather extreme in some cases, demands to…
Beyond visual line-of-sight connectivity is key for use cases of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and rescue missions. Cellular networks stand ready to support flying UAVs by providing wide-area, quality, and secure connectivity for UAV operations. Ensuring reliable connections in the presence of UAV movements is important for safety control and operations of UAVs. With increasing height above the ground, the radio environment changes. Using terrestrial cellular networks to provide connectivity to the UAVs moving in the sky may face new chall…
The consideration of mobile networks as a communication infrastructure for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) creates a new plethora of emerging services and opportunities. In particular, the availability of different mobile network operators (MNOs) can be exploited by the UAVs to steer connection to the MNO ensuring the best quality of experience (QoE). While the concept of traffic steering is more known at the network side, extending it to the device level would allow meeting the emerging requirements of today's applications. In this vein, an efficient steering solutions that take into account …
As an autonomous vehicles, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are subjected to several challenges. One of the challenges is for UAV to be able to avoid collision. Many collision avoidance methods have been proposed to address this issue. Furthermore, in a multi-UAV system, it is also important to address communication issue among UAVs for cooperation and collaboration. This issue can be addressed by setting up an ad-hoc network among UAVs. There is also a need to consider the challenges in the deployment of UAVs, as well as, in the development of collision avoidance methods and the establishment …
The growing presence of UAVs has led operators to explore the issue of how to provide wireless service to UAVs. The achieveable service quality will be affected by a number of factors, including the type of antenna that the UAVs are equipped with and whether to use existing cellular infrastructure or deploy dedicated ground stations to service these new user devices. In this paper we employ stochastic geometry to carry out an analysis of the UAV coverage probability that can be achieved with a network of dedicated ground stations using a sub-6GHz technology such as LTE under different deployme…
The research presented here has been conducted as part of professor Fabrizion Granelli's course "Advanced Network Modeling and Design" at UniTn and regards the use of drones as mobile base stations. With the advent of fifth generation (5G) RANs, networks will have to handle an increasing amount of diverse devices. This will lead to a greater demand on current telecom companies and infrastructures. Solutions to meet these current new demands might not suffice in guaranteeing the required service for the increasing demand. In emergency situations in particular, using terrestrial infrastructures …
The communication system is a critical part of the system design for the autonomous UAV. It has to address different considerations, including efficiency, reliability and mobility of the UAV. In addition, a multi-UAV system requires a communication system to assist information sharing, task allocation and collaboration in a team of UAVs. In this paper, we review communication solutions for supporting a team of UAVs while considering an application in the power line inspection industry. We provide a review of candidate wireless communication technologies {for supporting communication in UAV app…
The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have strengthen the self-monitoring and autonomous characteristics of the sensor networks deployed in numerous application areas. The recent developments of the edge computing paradigms have also enabled on-site processing and managing capabilities of sensor networks. In this paper, we introduce a system model that enables end-to-end secure connectivity between low-power IoT devices and UAVs, that helps to manage data processing tasks of a heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. The performance of proposed solution is analyzed by u…
Wireless Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were introduced in the world of 4th generation networks (4G) as cellular users, and have attracted the interest of the wireless community ever since. In~5G, UAVs operate also as flying Base Stations providing service to ground users. They can also implement independent off-the-grid UAV networks. In~6G networks, wireless UAVs will connect ground users to in-orbit wireless infrastructure. As the design and prototyping of wireless UAVs are on the rise, the time is ripe for introducing a more precise definition of what is a wireless UAV. In doing so, we rev…
Modern day wireless networks have tremendously evolved driven by a sharp increase in user demands, continuously requesting more data and services. This puts significant strain on infrastructure based macro cellular networks due to the inefficiency in handling these traffic demands, cost effectively. A viable solution is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as intermediate aerial nodes between the macro and small cell tiers for improving coverage and boosting capacity. This letter investigates the problem of user demand based UAV assignment over geographical areas subject to high traffic …
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Autonomous flight for UAVs relies on visual information for avoiding obstacles and ensuring a safe collision-free flight. In addition to visual clues, safe UAVs often need connectivity with the ground station. In this paper, we study the synergies between vision and communications for edge computing-enabled UAV flight. By proposing a framework of Edge Computing Assisted Autonomous Flight (ECAAF), we illustrate that vision and communications can interact with and assist each other with the aid of edge computing and offloading, and further speed up the UAV mission completion. ECAAF consists of t…
San Diego State University（圣地亚哥州立大学）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）
An autonomous airborne network (AN) consists of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which can self-configure to provide seamless, low-cost and secure connectivity. AN is preferred for applications in civilian and military sectors because it can improve the network reliability and fault tolerance, reduce mission completion time through collaboration, and adapt to dynamic mission requirements. However, facilitating seamless communication in such ANs is a challenging task due to their fast node mobility, which results in frequent link disruptions. Many existing AN-specific mobility-aware sc…
Korea University（高丽大学）；Hallym University（翰林大学）；Ajou University（亚洲大学）；UC-Irvine（加州大学尔湾分校）
Autonomous surveillance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are deployed to observe the streets of the city for any suspicious activities. This paper utilizes surveillance UAVs for the purpose of detecting the presence of a fire in the streets. An extensive database is collected from UAV surveillance drones. With the aid of artificial intelligence (AI), fire stations can swiftly identify the presence of a fire emerging in the neighborhood. Spatio-temporal split learning is applied to this scenario to preserve privacy and globally train a fire classification model. Fires are hazardous natural disas…
Centre of Excellence for Testing & Research of AVs - NTU (CETRAN)（南洋理工大学自动驾驶车辆测试与研究卓越中心（CETRAN））；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Siemens Mobility Pte. Ltd.（西门子交通私人有限公司）
Vehicles with driving automation are increasingly being developed for deployment across the world. However, the onboard sensing and perception capabilities of such automated or autonomous vehicles (AV) may not be sufficient to ensure safety under all scenarios and contexts. Infrastructure-augmented environment perception using roadside infrastructure sensors can be considered as an effective solution, at least for selected regions of interest such as urban road intersections or curved roads that present occlusions to the AV. However, they incur significant costs for procurement, installation a…
