A cloud robotics architecture for an emergency management and monitoring service in a smart cityenvironment

Cloud robotics is revolutionizing not only the robotics industry but also the ICT world, giving robots more storage and computing capacity, opening new scenarios that blend the physical to the digital world. In this vision new IT architectures are required to manage robots, retrieve data from them and create services to interact with users. In this paper a possible implementation of a cloud robotics architecture for the interaction between users and UAVs is described. Using the latter as monitoring agents, a service for fighting crime in urban environment is proposed, making one step forward towards the idea of smart cit

UAV-CLOUD: A PLATFORM FOR UAV RESOURCES AND SERVICES ON THE CLOUD

UAVs - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – have gained significant attention recently, due to the increasingly growing range of applications. However, developing collaborative UAV applications using traditional technologies in a tightly coupled design requires a great deal of development effort, time, and budget especially for heterogeneous UAVs. Moreover, monitoring and accessing UAV resources using traditional communication media suffer from several restrictions and limitations. This research aims to simplify the efforts, reduce the time, and lower the costs of developing collaborative applications for distributed heterogeneous UAVs. In addition, the research aims to provide ubiquitous UAV resources access. A platform is proposed for developing distributed UAVs. This platform provides services to simplify application development. In this approach, UAVs are integrated with the Cloud Computing paradigm to provide ubiquitous access to their resources and services. Due to the limited capabilities of UAVs, a lightweight architecture is adopted. UAV resources and services are modeled in a Resource Oriented Architecture which is a new flexible web service design pattern with loosely coupled interaction between services. Hence, they are accessed as Representational State Transfer RESTful services using HTTP. Moreover, the research proposes using a broker architecture to increase efficiency by separating responsibilities. Therefore, it separates the requester’s logic and functionalities from the provider’s. It also takes the responsibility for allocating the issued request to the available and suitable UAV(s). To test the proposed platform, I first developed the UAV resources as a payload subsystem then provided them with Internet connectivity. Then, resource identifiers and uniform interfaces were developed using the RESTful Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). I also developed the broker service along with a database containing the information of the registered UAVs and their resources. The platform system components were tested using a requester interface in a browser by issuing a request for a resource to the broker to find and request the service from a suitable UAV. The test was done for retrieving data from UAVs as well as requesting actions from them. The main contributions of this research are proposing the UAV-Cloud platform for simplifying the development of ubiquitous UAV applications and its vii perspectives, as well as a lightweight loosely coupled design for UAV resources. Another contribution is developing the broker architecture for separating responsibilities in this platform

Integration of UAVS with Real Time Operating Systems and Establishing a Secure Data Transmission

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)In today’s world, the applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems are leaping by extending their scope from military applications on to commercial and medical sectors as well. Owing to this commercialization, the need to append external hardware with UAV systems becomes inevitable. This external hardware could aid in enabling wireless data transfer between the UAV system and remote Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) using low powered architecture like Thread, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). The data is being transmitted from the flight controller to the ground control station using a MAVlink (Micro Air Vehicle Link) protocol. But this radio transmission method is not secure, which may lead to data leakage problems. The ideal aim of this research is to address the issues of integrating different hardware with the flight controller of the UAV system using a light-weight protocol called UAVCAN (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Controller Area Network). This would result in reduced wiring and would harness the problem of integrating multiple systems to UAV. At the same time, data security is addressed by deploying an encryption chip into the UAV system to encrypt the data transfer using ECC (Elliptic curve cryptography) and transmitting it to cloud platforms instead of radio transmission