Flexible Deployment and Enforcement of Flight and Privacy Restrictions for Drone Applications

Abstract

As drones gradually become a key component of next-generation cyber-physical systems, it is important to manage them in a flexible and efficient way. At the same time, it is crucial to enforce certain restrictions, which may not only concern no-fly zones but may also limit the usage of specific sensors, especially in urban areas. To this end, we propose an open system that enables the flexible deployment and controlled execution of drone applications. On the one hand, applications come in the form of independently executable software bundles that can be deployed on whichever drones are available and satisfy the corresponding resource and flight requirements. On the other hand, suitable mechanisms are used to monitor the execution of the applications at runtime in order to check conformance to the restrictions posed by the authorities, as well as to handle related violations in an automated way. In this paper, we present the key elements of the proposed approach and describe a proof-of-concept implementation that supports most of the envisioned functionality. We also provide a validation of our system prototype using both a software-in-the-loop setup and a real drone in the open.